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FORIEGN POLICY
WHAT’S AT STAKE?
19
WHAT’S AT STAKE?
UNDERSTANDING FOREIGN POLICY
W
as it a gaffe, as critics claimed, or a reflection of good judgment? In
a 2008 debate among contenders for the Democratic presidential
nomination, Senator Barack Obama indicated that he would be
willing to sit down with America’s enemies and attempt to find common
ground. His Democratic opponents pounced and once he had locked up the
nomination, Republican senator John McCain jumped on the remark as
well, calling it reckless policy.1 He claimed that the idea that progress can be
made by talking to grave enemies is naive and that such negotiations only
embolden the enemy. Obama, on the other hand, continued to contend that
“strong countries and strong presidents talk to their adversaries.” 2
The dilemma is a familiar one to most of us. Did you ever get so mad at
someone that you simply refused to talk to him until he apologized to you or
changed his ways? If so, you know what a mixed-bag this strategy can be. You
use the silent treatment as a way to get your friend to change his attitude, but
if he decides to keep on doing whatever got you mad in the first place, you
have very little leverage since you’re not talking to him anymore. Even reaching out through a third person to keep the lines of communication open can
be complicated and confusing. And having adjusted to life without talking to
you, your friend may have decided he’s just fine that way. Of course, some
transgressions are so serious that silence may be the best and permanent solution, but short of that, how do you decide when to “go silent”?
The U.S. government confronts this dilemma regularly, and from time to
time has decided that another country’s behavior is so contrary to American
interests that we should not even talk to its leaders, at least not directly. For
example, after Fidel Castro took power in the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and
his government cracked down on political opposition and became allies with
the Soviet Union, the United States cut off relations with the island nation.
The tactic of not talking to enemy countries became standard practice,
however, in the George W. Bush administration. In his address to a joint session of Congress, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President
Bush announced a key element of the emerging war on terrorism:
The Post–Cold War Setting of
American Foreign Policy
Types of Foreign Policy
WHO MAKES AMERICAN FOREIGN
POLICY?
The President
The Executive Branch
Congress
Presidential-Congressional Power
Struggles
HOW DO WE DEFINE A FOREIGN
POLICY PROBLEM?
The American Style of Foreign Policy
Global Pressures
Domestic Pressures
HOW DO WE SOLVE FOREIGN POLICY
PROBLEMS?
Strategies: Deterrence, Compellence,
and Preemption
Foreign Policy Instruments
FOREIGN POLICY CHALLENGES
Terrorism
Conflicts and Alliances
Free Trade Versus Protectionism
Problems Without Borders
Extending the Reach of Democracy
THE CITIZENS AND FOREIGN POLICY
WHAT’S AT STAKE
REVISITED
Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you
are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any
863
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864
Chapter 19 Foreign Policy
nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by
the United States as a hostile regime.3
The administration decided that Iran and North Korea were indeed “against
us” due to their support of terrorism and pursuit of nuclear weapons, and President Bush refused to talk one-on-one with either of these countries, whom he
labeled (along with Iraq), as members of the “Axis of Evil.” While the Bush administration remained open to talks with these countries as long as other states
were also at the table, they believed that to have “bilateral” talks with either nation would make the United States look weak. Before we would meet with them
alone, they had to change their behavior.
How are we as citizens to evaluate this policy? Was Obama’s position correct,
that strong leaders can talk to their enemies, or was McCain a better judge of the
situation? Diplomacy can be a crucial tool of American foreign policy. Nixon
talked to Vietnam’s leaders during the Vietnam War, after all, and Reagan talked
to the Soviets during the Cold War. At the same time, Reagan refused to talk to
Cuba. Sometimes our “interests” might dictate that we talk to someone, because
we have things in common even though we have other vast differences, but our
“values” might suggest we shouldn’t talk, because our enemy’s actions are so repugnant to the basic tenets of democracy and freedom. This is not just a theoretical question; it’s
one that our national leaders must answer as they
steer the ship of state. What are advantages of talking, and the merits of refusing to meet? What is really at stake in deciding whether to talk with our
enemies? We return to this question after we learn
more about how U.S. foreign policy is made. ❋
Is There Common Ground to Be Found?
This undated picture, released from Korean Central News Agency
in June 2008, shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Il (left) chatting with female soldiers at an undisclosed location. One of the
world’s most reclusive and poverty-stricken countries, North
Korea, part of George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil,” is known to have
nuclear capabilities and has frequently broken or ignored arms
treaties with the United States and other countries while
threatening to enhance its nuclear weapons capacity.
A
sk Americans to name the top problem facing the country today, and about 25
percent will say the war in Iraq or terrorism. But there’s hardly a consensus
that these are our leading problems; nearly 40 percent pick the economy and
jobs; 25 percent say the price of gas; and issues like unemployment, poverty, and
health care get lots of votes as well.4
Foreign policy, even in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, still fails to
capture most Americans’ attention. After all, foreign policy is so, well, foreign. Despite
witnessing how vulnerable we can be, Americans tend to see the rest of the world as a
place that doesn’t much affect us. And if we aren’t particularly attentive to policy issues within our own borders, why would we pay much attention to things that happen outside those borders?
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or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
What’s At Stake?
In this chapter we discuss foreign policy—official U.S. policy designed to solve
problems that take place between us and actors outside our borders. We will see that
our foreign policy is crucial to our domestic tranquility, that without a strong and effective foreign policy, our security as a rich and peaceful country could be blown away
in a heartbeat. Our foreign policy is almost always carried out for the good of American citizens or in the interest of national security. Even foreign aid, which seems like
giving away American taxpayers’ hard-earned money to people who have done nothing to deserve it, is part of a foreign policy to stabilize the world, to help strengthen
international partnerships and alliances, and to keep Americans safe. Similarly, humanitarian intervention, like the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) military
action in Kosovo in 1999, is ultimately conducted to support our values and the quality of life we think other nations ought to provide for their citizens.
Many politicians have tried to encourage Americans to turn their backs on the
rest of the world, promoting a foreign policy called isolationism, which holds that
Americans should put themselves and their problems first and not interfere in
global concerns. The United States has tried to pursue an isolationist policy before,
perhaps most notably after World War I, but this experiment was largely seen as a
failure. Most recently, the events of September 11 have put to rest the fiction that
what happens “over there” is unrelated to what is happening “over here.” In opposition to isolationism, interventionism holds that to keep the republic safe, we must
be actively engaged in shaping the global environment and be willing to intervene
in order to shape events. The United States has had a long history of interventionism—in the Americas and Asia in the 1800s, in World Wars I and II, and, since September 11, in the Middle East.
Foreign policy exists to support American interests, but determining what American interests are can be very difficult. In crisis situations, as we will see, foreign policy
decisions are often made in secret. At the beginning, only a handful of people knew
about the Cuban missile crisis President John Kennedy faced, even though the consequences of that crisis could have sent us into a nuclear war. Similarly, part of the current war on terrorism takes place outside of public sight—although much of the war
in Iraq is in full view. In secret decision-making situations, American interests are
whatever elite policymakers decide they are. When situations are not critical, however,
foreign policy decisions are made in the usual hubbub of American politics. Here, as
we know, many actors with competing interests struggle to make their voices heard
and to get policy to benefit themselves. Foreign policy, just like domestic policy, is
about who gets what, and how they get it. The difference is that in foreign policy the
stakes can be a matter of life and death, and we have far less control over the other actors involved.
In this chapter we look at American foreign policy in far more depth than most
Americans ever do. Specifically, you will learn about
•
•
•
•
•
•
865
foreign policy a country’s
official positions, practices,
and procedures for dealing
with actors outside its borders
isolationism a foreign policy
view that nations should stay
out of international political
alliances and activities, and
focus on domestic matters
interventionism a foreign
policy view that the United
States should actively engage
in the affairs of other nations
in order to try to shape events
in accordance with U.S. interests
the nature of foreign policy
who makes foreign policy
the international and domestic contexts of foreign policy
the strategies and instruments of foreign policy
American foreign policy in the new century
the challenges faced by democratic citizens in a policymaking context where secrecy
is often necessary
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or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
866
Chapter 19 Foreign Policy
UNDERSTANDING FOREIGN POLICY
Foreign policy focuses on U.S. governmental goals and actions directed toward actors
outside our borders. This outward focus separates foreign policy from domestic policy, although sometimes the distinction between “foreign” and “domestic” policy is not
so clear. Consider, for example, how environmental policy in America can have foreign repercussions. American industries located on the border with Canada have been
the source of some tensions between the two countries because pollution from the
U.S. factories is carried into Canada by prevailing winds. This pollution can damage
forest growth and increase the acidity of lakes, killing fish and harming other wildlife.
Environmental regulations are largely a domestic matter, but because pollution is not
confined to the geography of the United States, the issue takes on unintended international importance. Or by not seriously reducing the emission of “greenhouse” gases
in the United States, because many think doing so would be bad for business, the
whole world is less capable of addressing global climate change, which has led to some
anti-U.S. sentiment. In this chapter we focus our discussion of foreign policy on actions that are intentionally directed at external actors and the forces that shape these
actions. External actors include the following:
• Other countries—sovereign bodies with governments and territories, like Mexico or
the Republic of Ireland.
intergovernmental
organizations bodies, such
as the United Nations, whose
members are countries
nongovernmental
organizations organizations
comprising individuals or
interest groups from around
the world focused on
a special issue
multinational corporations
large companies that do
business in multiple countries
• Intergovernmental organizations—bodies that have countries as members, such as
the United Nations, which has 192 member countries; NATO, which has 26 members from North America and Europe; the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries (OPEC), which has 14 member countries from Africa, Asia, the Middle
East, and Latin America; and the European Union (EU), which has 27 members
from across Europe and 3 more waiting to join.
• Nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs—organizations that focus on specific
issues and whose members are private individuals or groups from around the
world. Greenpeace (environmental), Amnesty International (human rights), International Committee of the Red Cross (humanitarian relief), and Doctors Without
Borders (medical care) are NGOs.
• Multinational corporations—large companies that do business in multiple countries and that often wield tremendous economic power, like Nike or General
Motors.
• Miscellaneous other actors—groups that do not fit the other categories, including
those that have a “government” but no territory, like the Middle East’s Palestinians,
and groups that have no national ties, such as terrorist groups like al Qaeda.
THE POST–COLD WAR SETTING OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY
Before we can hope to have a clear understanding of contemporary American foreign
policy, a historical note is in order. At the end of World War II, when the common purpose of fighting Adolf Hitler and ending German fascism no longer held the United
States and the Soviet Union in an awkward alliance, the tensions that existed between
the two largest and strongest superpowers in global politics began to bubble to the
surface. Nearly all of Europe was divided between allies of the Soviets and allies of the
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Understanding Foreign Policy
United States, a division seen most graphically in the splitting of postwar Germany
into a communist East and a capitalist West. On March 5, 1946, former British prime
minister Winston Churchill, who led his country during the war, gave a famous speech
at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in which he warned of this new divided
world: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.” Churchill’s words were not meant just as a description
but as a call to action.
For nearly fifty years following World War II the tension between the two superpowers shaped U.S. foreign policy and gave it a predictable order. The Cold War was
waged between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1947 to 1989, a war of
bitter global competition between democracy and authoritarianism, capitalism and
communism. Although the tensions of the Cold War never erupted into an actual
“hot” war of military action directly between the two countries, each side spent
tremendous sums of money on nuclear weapons to make sure it had the ability to
wipe out the other side, and a number of so-called proxy wars between allies of each
superpower did break out in places like the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. In this era,
American foreign policy makers pursued a policy of containment, in which the
United States tried to prevent the Soviet Union from expanding its influence, especially in Europe. As we will see later in the chapter, a key part of this strategy of containment was to deter potential Soviet aggression against the United States or our allies with the threat of a massive nuclear response that would erase any gains the
Soviets might make.
But as dangerous as the world was during the Cold War, it—and the threat posed
by nuclear deterrence—seemed easy to understand, casting complicated issues into
simple choices of black or white. Countries were either with us or against us: they were
free societies or closed ones, capitalist or communist economies, good or bad. Relations between nations might put us in treacherous waters, but we had a well-marked
map. As late as the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as the
“Evil Empire,” an allusion to the popular Star Wars world, in which good and evil were
clearly defined. Though the world was hardly this simple, it certainly seemed that way
to many, and much of the complexity of world politics was glossed over—or perhaps
bottled up, only to explode at the end of the Cold War in 1989.5
Perhaps the most dramatic image of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its iron
curtain was the eager tearing down of the Berlin Wall by the citizens it had divided
into two separate cities—capitalism and democracy on one side of the wall, communism and totalitarianism on the other. The countries in Eastern Europe that had been
Soviet satellite countries broke away as the power holding the Soviet Union together
dissolved. In some countries, like Germany, the end came more or less peacefully; in
others, like Romania, the break was more violent.
In 1991 the Soviet Union finally fell apart, to be replaced by more than a dozen independent states (see Consider the Source: “How to Become a Critical Reader of
Maps”). While most Westerners have hailed the fall of the Soviet Union as an end to
the tension that kept the Cold War alive, Russia (one of the states of the former Soviet
Union) still holds the Soviet nuclear arsenal, and a majority of its citizens still hold a
negative view of the leaders of the U.S. Anti-American sentiment continues to simmer, especially as efforts at Russian economic reform have been accompanied by suffering, deprivation, corruption, and an increasing fear about the exercise of civil liberties. At the same time, the Western military alliance NATO has enlarged by
absorbing members of the former Soviet alliance, the Warsaw Treaty Organization, or
867
Cold War the half-century of
competition and conflict after
World War II between the
United States and the Soviet
Union (and their allies)
containment the U.S. Cold War
policy of preventing the spread
of communism
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or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
868
Consider the Source
HOW TO BECOME A CRITICAL READER OF MAPS
The next time you happen to be in Asia, take a look at a
map of the world. Guess what? The United States is not in
the center; in fact, it’s squished over to one side. Asia is in
the center. Can it be that Asian mapmakers are just poorly
trained or out of touch? Of course not. The Asia-centric
maps used by schoolchildren in Korea, China, and Japan reveal an important feature of mapmaking—it is political.
The national boundaries that we see on a map are not
etched into the earth; they are made by humans and constantly being rearranged as the peoples of the earth rearrange themselves. For instance, mapmakers had their
hands full in 1991, when the Soviet Union fell. As we can see
in the map here, a giant republic had broken down into
many small countries—as if the United States were all at
once fifty separate nations. The lines of Eastern Europe had
to be redrawn, and redrawn again, as the ethnic and national rivalries suppressed by Soviet domination began to
work themselves out politically and militarily (see the map
inset on Yugoslavia). The political nature of mapmaking
means that we need to ask ourselves some important
questions about the maps—in the media, in books, in classrooms—that purport to tell us what the world looks like.
1. What type of information is being conveyed by the
map? Maps are not just graphic illustrations of national
boundaries. They can also reveal topography (mountains, hills, oceans, rivers, and lakes), population density,
weather patterns, economic resources, transportation,
and a host of other characteristics. The map on page [I
don’t believe this map is used in this edition] for instance, shows how the various colonies voted on the
Constitution. Maps can also show regional patterns of
colonization, immigration, industrialization, and technological development.
2. Who drew the map? This information can explain not
only why Asia is at the center of a world map, but more
overtly political questions as well. Palestinians and Israelis, for instance, might draw very different maps of
contested territories. Mapmaking can be not only a precise way of delineating national borders, but also a way
of staking a claim.
3. When was the map drawn? A map of today’s Europe
would look very different from a map of Europe in 1810,
when the continent was dominated by the Napoleonic,
Austrian, and Ottoman Empires; the Confederation of
the Rhine; and at least three separate kingdoms in what
is now Italy. The map of Europe continued to change
throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
until it reflected the Cold War division between the
East and West from the mid-1900s on. The map at right
shows how the end of the Cold War again changed the
map of Europe. The maps of North America on page 105
show the patterns of national dominance over a much
shorter period—before 1754 and after 1763. Not only do
boundaries change over time, but even the names of
countries can be different. The countries once known as
Siam, the Congo, and Rhodesia have changed their
names to Thailand, Zaire, and Zimbabwe, respectively.
Name changes often reflect a country’s attempt to emphasize a particular part of its heritage, or to disavow
foreign influences.
Warsaw Pact, and the U.S. is moving toward placing a radar for its missile defense system inside a former member of the Soviet alliance, seen by many in Russia as a potential threat.
This “new world order,” or post–Cold War era, has eluded easy description in terms
of global organization and threats to the United States, especially in the days since September 11, 2001.6 Who is likely to be our most dangerous adversary? What threats must
we prepare for? How much should we spend on military preparedness? Are we the
world’s policeman, a global banker, or a humanitarian protector? We have experimented with all of these roles in the past decade.7 In September 2002, President George
W. Bush opened the door to a new foreign policy role when he asserted that the United
States’ role is to maintain its military supremacy and take preemptive action against
hostile and threatening states. The president also said that the United States would
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or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
How to Become a Critical Reader of Maps
THE BREAKUP
OF YUGOSLAVIA
SLOVENIA
869
Communist regimes overthrown since 1989
• Rise of Solidarity in Poland, 1980
• Czechoslovakia broken into Czech
Republic and Slovakia in 1993
CROATIA
BOSNIA AND
Soviet Union, dissolved in 1991 and replaced
by Commonwealth of Independent States
SERBIA
SWEDEN
FINLAND
Yugoslavia, dissolved in civil war, 1991-1992
NORWAY
U.S. troops join NATO
peacekeeping forces,
Dec. 1995
MACEDONIA
UNITED
IRELAND KINGDOM
North
Sea
NETH.
DENMARK
Baltic ESTONIA
Sea LATVIA
LITHUANIA
Berlin
GERMANY
POLAND
Gorbachev assumes power, 1985;
Moscow coup fails, Boris Yeltsin
declared President of Russia, 1990;
USSR dissolved, 1991
BELARUS
BELG.
Fall of Berlin Wall, 1989;
Germany unified, 1990
SWITZ.
FRANCE
CZECH
UKRAINE
REP. SLOVAKIA
AUSTRIA
MOLDOVA
HUNGARY
ROMANIA
ITALY
See inset
Black Sea
Sea
GREECE
TUNISIA
SYRIA
CYPRUS
LEBANON
Mediterranean Sea
MOROCCO
Aral Sea
UZBEKISTAN
GEORGIA
KYRGYZSTAN
ARMENIA AZERBAIJAN
TURKMENISTAN
TURKEY
TAJIKISTAN
CHINA
ALBANIA
SPAIN
KAZAKHSTAN
ian
BULGARIA
Chechnya declares
independence, 1991;
Russia attacks, 1994
C as p
A TLA NTI C
OC E A N
PORTUGAL
RUSSIA
Moscow
ISRAEL
IRAN
IRAQ
AFGHANISTAN
JORDAN
Sea
SAUDI
ARABIA
PAKISTAN
lf
Gu
R ed
EGYPT
INDIA
an
LIBYA
r si
Pe
ALGERIA
0
Arabian
Sea
0
250
500 mi
250 500 km
Source: Thomas Bailey, David M. Kennedy, and Lizabeth Cohen, The American Pageant, 11th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). Copyright ©1998 by
Houghton Mifflin Company, Reprinted with permission.
make no distinction between terrorist groups that threaten or attack the United States
and countries that harbor those groups. In identifying an “axis of evil” of Iran, Iraq, and
North Korea, President Bush set out a vision of American foreign policy that is rooted
in taking active steps to promote democracy and to use force, alone if necessary, to
eliminate perceived threats before they can more fully develop. This Bush Doctrine
joins a long list of presidential foreign policy doctrines that have tried to define and
protect U.S. interests in the world (see Who, What, How, and WHEN timeline).
Bush Doctrine policy that
supports preemptive attacks as
a legitimate tactic in the U.S. war
on state-sponsored terrorism
TYPES OF FOREIGN POLICY
We can more easily understand the complexity of American foreign policy if we break
it down into three specific types:8
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or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
870
Chapter 19 Foreign Policy
• Crisis policy deals with emergency threats to our national interests or values. Such situations often come as a surprise, and the
use of force is one way to respond.9 This is the kind of policy people often have in mind when they use the term foreign policy.
Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 provoked a crisis for the United
States, as did the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington,
D.C., in 2001.
• Strategic policy lays out the basic U.S. stance toward another
country or a particular problem. Containment, for example, was
the key strategy for dealing with the Soviets during the Cold
War—the plan was to prevent communism from spreading to
other countries.
• Structural defense policy focuses largely on the policies and programs that deal with defense spending and military bases. These
policies usually focus on, for example, buying new aircraft for
the air force and navy, or deciding what military bases to consolidate or close down.
And the Wall Came Tumbling Down
In November 1989 an East German official announced that
East Germans would be allowed to move freely between
East and West Berlin. Almost immediately, people flocked
to the wall that had kept them separated from their fellow
Berliners for twenty-eight years, a wall that had symbolized
the division not only of a city, but of ideals and political
systems—capitalism and democracy on one side and
totalitarianism on the other.
crisis policy foreign policy,
usually made quickly and
secretly, that responds to
an emergency threat
strategic policy foreign policy
that lays out a country’s basic
stance toward international
actors or problems
structural defense policy
foreign policy dealing with
defense spending, military bases,
and weapons procurement
We come back to these distinctions in the next section, when we
discuss what kinds of actors are involved in making each of these
types of policies. They provide important insights into who is involved in different types of American foreign policy.
In foreign policy, official government actors seek to
solve problems that occur outside our borders. They
WHAT
do this by constructing crisis, strategic, and structural
defense policies.
HOW
Americans also seek to define a role for themselves
in the new world order that has replaced the politics of the Cold War. So far there has
been no definitive answer to what role the world’s only remaining superpower will play.
WHO
WHO MAKES AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY?
Consider the following headlines: “U.S. Opens Relations With China” and “U.S. Attacks al Qaeda Base in Afghanistan.” These headlines make it sound as if a single
actor—the United States—makes foreign policy. Even as a figure of speech, this is
misleading in two important ways. First, the image of the United States as a single
actor suggests that the country acts with a single, united mind, diverting our attention from the political reality of conflict, bargaining, and cooperation that takes
place within the government over foreign policy.10 Second, it implies that all foreign
policies are essentially the same—having the same goals and made by the same actors and processes. Our earlier description of the three different policy types indicates that this is not so; and in fact, as we will see, each type of policy is made by different actors in different political contexts.
The political dynamics behind crisis policy, for instance, are dominated by the
president and the small group of advisers around the Oval Office. Congress tends
not to be much engaged in crisis policy but, rather, often watches with the rest of the
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or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Who Makes American Foreign Policy?
public (and the world) as presidents and their advisers decide how to respond to international crises. The choice of going to war in Iraq in 2003, for example, was made
by President Bush and a number of key government policymakers around him.
Strategic policy tends to be formulated in the executive branch, but usually
deep in the bureaucracy rather than at the top levels. This gives interest groups
and concerned members of Congress opportunities to lobby for certain policies.
The public usually learns about these policies (and responds to and evaluates
them) once they are announced by the president. The U.S. policy of containment
of communism in the 1940s, for example, was developed largely in the State Department and was then approved by President Harry Truman. The Truman Doctrine said that the United States would use its power to help free people maintain
their freedom in the face of aggressive movements, which is to say the United
States would try to contain Soviet influence by helping make sure that no new
countries fell to communism.11
Finally, structural defense policy, which often starts in the executive branch, is
largely crafted in Congress, whose members tend to have their fingers on the pulses
of their constituents, with much input from the bureaucracy and interest groups.
When a plan to build and deploy a new fighter jet is developed, for example, it is
made with coordination between Congress and the Defense Department—usually
with members of Congress keeping a close eye on how their states and districts will
fare from the projects.
Clearly a variety of actors are involved in making different types of foreign policy. What they all have in common is that they are officially acting on behalf of the
federal government. It is not official foreign policy when New York City and San
Francisco impose economic sanctions on Burma, or when private citizens like former president Jimmy Carter or the Rev. Jesse Jackson attempt to help resolve conflicts in Africa or Serbia.12 Understanding why a particular foreign policy is developed means understanding what actors are involved in what processes.
871
Truman Doctrine policy of
the United States starting in
1947 that the United States
would aid free peoples to
maintain their freedom in the
face of aggressive communist
movements
To Serve and Protect
Politicians and the U.S. military
share an edict to protect the lives
and rights of Americans, at home or
abroad, and to defend democracy
worldwide. Here, Michael Michaud,
D-Maine, shakes hands with an Iraqi
boy who lost his legs in an explosion and received a wheelchair from
the family of a U.S. soldier killed in
action in the area. Michaud was in
Yusifiyah to observe the progress
made in Iraq as of in April 2008.
Given the billions of U.S. dollars
invested in military operations
in Iraq and Afghanistan, political
officials are diligent in their
oversight of where and how
the money is being spent.
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Who, What, How, and WHEN
Presidential Foreign Policy
Doctrine Over Time
I
n response to world events, presidents often publicly define U.S. foreign policy interests
and state what the U.S. role in protecting those interests will be. Watch some of these
doctrines change and develop, over time:
1947
Truman Doctrine
➤ In response to the Soviet Union and
its control of the Iron Curtain in Eastern
Europe, Truman declared the United
States would support foreign governments facing internal or external subversion from communist movements.
1823
Monroe Doctrine
➤ In the wake of discussion between France,
Britain, Spain, and Russia about expansion of
trading colonies in South America, Monroe
wished to limit European influence in North
and South America to protect U.S. security
and options for what became manifest destiny. He declared the Western Hemisphere
off limits to further European colonization.
1904
1957
Roosevelt Corollary to
the Monroe Doctrine
Eisenhower Doctrine
➤ To keep Germany from intervening in Venezuela’s
economic and political affairs, Teddy Roosevelt declared that the United States would act as a police
power in Caribbean and Central American nations if
they could not pay their debts, to keep European
powers from controlling these countries.
➤ When the Soviet Union attempted to gain
control of the Suez Canal and Egypt, Eisenhower
declared the Middle East was a vital region to the
United States, and that the United States would
support the region with aid and respond to
threats against the United States pertaining to
the region.
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Who, What, How, and WHEN
873
1985
Reagan Doctrine
1969
Nixon Doctrine
➤ As unrest over involvement in the Vietnam War continued to grow, Nixon declared that the United States would
continue to provide help such as monetary aid to its allies
but would expect these allies, such as South Vietnam, to
start defending themselves.
➤ As Cold War tension with the Soviet Union
resurged in the mid-1980s, Reagan declared the
United States would provide aid to any country
fighting communism by way of insurgents,
or “freedom fighters,” particularly in
Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
2001
Bush Doctrine
1980
Carter Doctrine
➤ After the September 11 attacks, Bush stated the United
States would consider any country that harbored terrorists
to be a threat to the country; later, the doctrine was expanded to defend attacks by the United States in an
effort to preempt state-sponsored terrorism.
➤ After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan
in 1979, Carter declared the United States
would repel any attempt by an outside force
to gain control of the Persian Gulf region using
any means necessary, including military force.
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874
Chapter 19 Foreign Policy
THE PRESIDENT
As we saw in Chapter 8, the president has come to be seen as the chief foreign policy
maker. Presidents are more likely to set the foreign policy agenda than are other actors
in American politics because of the informal powers that come from their high-profile job and their opportunities to communicate directly with the public. Understanding the power that comes with agenda control is a key part of understanding presidential power. But the president’s foreign policy authority also derives from the
Constitution, which gives him specific roles to play. Recall from Chapter 8 that the
president is the head of state, the chief executive, the commander-in-chief, and the
country’s chief diplomat. For a president, making foreign policy is a bit like walking a
tightrope. On the one hand, presidents get a lot of power to make foreign policy from
the Constitution, from their “implied powers,” and, sometimes, from Congress. On
the other hand, the president is confronted with many obstacles to making foreign
policy in the form of domestic issues (particularly if he is trying to get reelected) and
other foreign policy makers, especially Congress and the bureaucracy, as well as the
media and public opinion.
THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH
National Security Council
(NSC) organization within
the Executive Office of the
President that provides foreign
policy advice to the president
The president sits at the top of a large pyramid of executive agencies and departments
that assist him in making foreign policy. If he does not take time to manage the agencies, other individuals may seize the opportunity to interpret foreign policy in terms
of their own interests and goals. It is largely up to the president to sort out conflicting
goals in the executive branch. In a sense, the president provides a check on the power
of the executive agencies, and without his leadership, foreign policy can drift. During
his administration, President Reagan didn’t pay a lot of attention to foreign affairs and
so staff members in the National Security Council began to make foreign policy themselves. The result was the Iran-contra affair in the mid-1980s, in which profits from
selling arms to Iran (technically illegal in U.S. law but done in an effort to get Iran’s
help to release western hostages) were used to help fund the Nicaraguan contra rebels,
aid for whom Congress had refused to approve (see the box in Chapter 8, “Grounds
for Impeachment”).
Within the president’s inner circle (in the Executive Office of the President, or
EOP) is the National Security Council (NSC), a body created in 1947 by the National
Security Act to advise the president on matters of foreign policy. By law its members
include the president, vice president, secretary of state, and secretary of defense. Additionally, the new director of national intelligence and the chair of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff (the head of the commanders of the military services) sit as advisers to the NSC.
Beyond this, though, the president has wide discretion to decide what the NSC will
look like and how he will use it by appointing other members and deciding how the
council will function.
The national security adviser, the president’s chief adviser on foreign policy and
national security matters, coordinates the NSC and its staff. When the national security adviser gets the ear of the president, as Condoleezza Rice had under President
Bush during his first term, that person is uniquely positioned to shape foreign policy.
Very few officials in the executive branch have the power to challenge the National Security Adviser, although likely competitors would be the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Bush later showed his
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Who Makes American Foreign Policy?
875
confidence in his national security advisor by making her his
second secretary of state in 2004. See “Profiles in Citizenship”
in Chapter 8.
In addition to the NSC, several executive departments
and agencies play a critical role in foreign policy making.
The Department of State is charged with managing foreign
affairs. It is often considered to be “first among equals” in its
position relative to the other departments because it was the
first department established by the Constitution in 1789.
The State Department is headed by a secretary of state, who
is part of the president’s cabinet and fulfills a variety of foreign policy roles. The first of these roles is maintaining
diplomatic and consular posts around the world. These
diplomatic posts are designed to facilitate communication
between the United States and foreign countries, provide assistance for U.S. travelers, and grant visas or political asylum
to foreign nationals seeking to enter the United States. A
second function of the State Department is to send delegates and missions (groups of government officials) to a variety of international organization meetings. A third function of the State Department is to negotiate treaties and
executive agreements with other countries. Among the bestknown employees of the State Department are the foreign
service officers, the most senior of whom are U.S. ambassa- Traveling for World Peace
dors. Foreign service officers play a key role in diplomacy as Palestinian Authority president Mahmud Abbas welcomes U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the West Bank city of Ramallah
they represent the United States abroad, report back on on
August 26, 2008. Rice was there to take part in Israeli-Palestinian
events overseas, help manage ongoing negotiations, and as- peace talks. Such diplomatic contact with governments around the
world is a necessary part of foreign policy.
sist U.S. citizens traveling abroad.
The second major department involved in foreign policy is
Department of State the
the Department of Defense, headquartered in the Pentagon—the distinctive fiveexecutive department charged
sided building in Arlington, Virginia. The main job of the department is to manage
with managing foreign affairs
American soldiers and their equipment to protect the United States. The Defense Department is headed by a secretary of defense, whose job in part is to advise the presiDepartment of Defense the
dent on defense matters and who, it is important to note, is a civilian. The idea that
executive department charged
the military should be under the authority of civilians is an important check in U.S.
with managing the country’s
politics.
military personnel, equipment,
The Joint Chiefs of Staff is part of the Defense Department. It consists, at the top,
and operations
of the senior military officers of the armed forces: the army and air force chiefs of staff,
the chief of naval operations, and the commandant of the marine corps. The chairJoint Chiefs of Staff the senior
man is selected by the president. The Joint Chiefs of Staff advises the secretary of demilitary officers from four
fense, and the chairman is the primary military adviser to the president and the secbranches of the U.S. armed
retary of defense.
forces
Another executive actor in foreign policy making is the group of agencies and bureaus that make up the intelligence community (see Figure 19.1). This community’s
intelligence community
job is the collection, organization, and analysis of information. That information can
the agencies and bureaus
be gathered in a number of ways from the mundane, such as reading foreign newsparesponsible for obtaining and
pers, to the more clandestine, like spying by human beings and by more high-tech
interpreting information for
means like surveillance satellites. This community of about fifteen separate agencies,
the government
many housed inside the Defense Department, was until recently coordinated by the
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876
Chapter 19 Foreign Policy
Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) the government
organization that oversees
foreign intelligence-gathering
and related classified activities
director of central intelligence, who was also the head of the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA). The CIA oversees intelligence gathering and classified activities abroad.
In addition to the CIA, there are intelligence components in each of the four branches
of the armed forces, as well as intelligence groups within the Departments of State,
Defense, Energy, and Treasury, and within the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The intelligence community also includes certain specialized agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA), which is responsible for cryptology (code breaking)
and monitoring communications with sophisticated satellites that can see and listen
to much of the planet.
At the end of 2004, in the wake of many studies and hearings about the events leading up to September 11, as well as current security concerns, President Bush signed
legislation that altered how the intelligence community is managed. The job of the director of central intelligence was limited to directing the CIA. The job of coordinating
the entire network of agencies now falls to the newly created director of national intelligence. While this person will not have direct authority over all members of the
community, or budgetary authority over all of it either, the idea is that this person will
have the ear of the president, meeting with the president each day, and that this, in
concert with some other changes, will help make it clear who runs the intelligence
community. A new National Counterterrorism Center was also created, which is to be
a central hub for planning and intelligence about terrorism and counterterrorism.
Because of the secrecy surrounding its activities, the exact size of the intelligence
community, its budget, and its activities are not very clear. For 2006 it was widely estimated that the budget for the intelligence community was perhaps as high as $40 billion, although what that money was spent on will never be known publicly because
much of what these agencies do is classified top-secret.
director of national
intelligence overseer and
coordinator of the activities
of the many agencies involved
in the production and
dissemination of intelligence
information in the U.S.
government, as well as the
president’s main intelligence
adviser
President
Nat. Security Council
Secretary
of State
Secretary
of Defense
Dir. Nat. Intelligence
Attorney
General
Secretary
of Treasury
Secretary
of Energy
Secretary
of
Homeland
Security
Joint Chiefs
of Staff
Dir. Nat. Intelligence staff
Dir. CIA
Bur. of Intelligence
Nat. Counterterrorism Center
Nat. Counterintelligence Exec.
Central
Intelligence
Agency
Defense
Intelligence
Agency
Nat. Security Agency
Nat. GeospatialIntelligence Agency
Dept of
Defense
Airborne
Nat. Intelligence Center
Nat. Counterproliferation
Center
Nat. Reconnaissance
Office
National Intelligence
Program
FIGURE 19.1
Key Foreign Policy Agencies
Military Intelligence
Program
Army
Navy
Air Force
Marines
Special
Operations
Command
FBI
CounterIntelligence
Intelligence
Coast Guard
Intelligence
and analysis
FBI
Intelligence
Drug
Enforcement
Agency
Intelligence
support
Operational control
Coordination
Source: Mark Lowenthal, Intelligence, 4th ed. (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2009).
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Who Makes American Foreign Policy?
Another major change after September 11 was the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, a new cabinet-level agency to better coordinate the steps
taken by the government to keep us safe at home. Agencies that were spread throughout the government but that all had some role in protecting the homeland were pulled
together under this new umbrella. Immigration services, the U.S. Secret Service, and
the Coast Guard, to name a few, now all share a common home.
In addition to the State Department, the Defense Department, the Department of
Homeland Security, and the intelligence community, a variety of other departments
also play a role in foreign policy. These include the Treasury Department and the
Commerce Department, both of which are concerned with American foreign economic policy—for example, with the export of American goods abroad. The Department of Agriculture is interested in promoting American agricultural products abroad
and gets involved when the United States ships food overseas as part of a humanitarian mission, for example, to help refugees in the aftermath of a civil war. Finally, the
Department of Labor is involved with labor issues around the world, such as studying
the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on American jobs.
877
Department of Homeland
Security the executive
department meant to provide
a unifying force in the efforts
of the government to prevent
attacks on the United States
and to respond to such attacks
through law enforcement and
emergency relief should they
occur
CONGRESS
As we saw in Chapter 7, Congress has a variety of constitutional roles in making foreign policy, including the power to make treaties, to declare war, and to appropriate
money, to name just a few. But Congress also faces obstacles in its efforts to play an
active foreign policy role. For most of the twentieth century until the 1970s, the president took the lead on foreign policy, leading one scholar to refer to an “imperial”
presidency.13 George W. Bush revived that role in fighting the war on terrorism. Even
when Congress wants to play a role, it is limited in what it can do. One reason is that
Congress is more oriented toward domestic than foreign affairs, given the constant
imperative of reelection. Congressional organization can also hamper the congressional role in foreign policy. The fragmentation of Congress, the slow speed of deliberation, and the complex nature of many foreign issues can make it difficult for Congress to play a big role—particularly in fast-moving foreign events.
PRESIDENTIAL-CONGRESSIONAL POWER STRUGGLES
The relationship between the executive and legislative branches in the foreign policy
realm has been called an “invitation to struggle” because both bodies have been given
some power by the Constitution to act in foreign policy.14 The jurisdictions of each,
however, are not clearly established by the Constitution and, in keeping with the principles of checks and balances, the powers are to some extent shared. In this inherent
tension, the president and Congress both maneuver for the top position (see Figure
19.2). Presidents, for example, try to get around the need for Senate approval of
treaties by using executive agreements instead, or they try to circumvent the Senate’s
confirmation power by making appointments while Congress is in recess. Such strategies have real costs, however, since the Senate does not take kindly to being bypassed
and the president needs the cooperation of Congress to accomplish his agenda. The
Senate was so angry when President Bill Clinton made one appointment while they
were on break that one senator vowed to block Clinton’s future nominations. Clinton
eventually promised to make no more such appointments without notifying Senate
leaders, and Senate leaders withdrew the block on Clinton’s other nominations.
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878
Chapter 19 Foreign Policy
The foreign policy tension between the president and Congress
is further exacerbated by the com• Chief of state
• Ratify treaties
• Chief executive
• Confirm appointments
plex issues surrounding the use of
• Commander-in-chief
• Declare war
military force. The president is in
• Chief diplomat
• Appropriate funds
charge of the armed forces, but
• Chief legislator
• Oversee agencies
only Congress can declare war.
• Enact legislation
Substantive
Presidents try to get around the
Procedural
power of Congress by committing
troops to military actions that do
not have the official status of war,
but this too can infuriate the legisCONGRESS
PRESIDENT
lators. Presidents have sent troops
abroad without a formal declaration of war on a number of occaFIGURE 19.2
sions, for example, in Korea
Executive/Legislative “Struggle” Over Foreign Policy
(1950), Vietnam (1965), Lebanon
(1982), the Dominican Republic
(1965), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), the Persian Gulf (1990), Afghanistan (2001),
and Iraq (2003)—among others. As the Vietnam War became a bigger issue, Congress
became increasingly unhappy with the president’s role but did not take steps to try to
challenge him until the early 1970s, when public opinion against the war became too
much for Congress to resist. Then Congress turned on the commander-in-chief, passing the War Powers Act of 1973 over President Richard Nixon’s veto. The act makes
the following provisions:
Congress’s powers
President’s powers
1. The president must inform Congress of the introduction of forces into hostilities
or situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the
circumstances.
2. Troop commitments by the president cannot extend past sixty days without specific congressional authorization (though another thirty days is permitted for the
withdrawal of the troops).
3. Any time American forces become engaged in hostilities without a declaration
of war or specific congressional authorization, Congress can direct the president
to disengage such troops by a concurrent resolution of the two houses of Congress.
The War Powers Act has not stopped presidents from using force abroad, however.
Chief executives have largely sidestepped the act through a simple loophole: they don’t
make their reports to Congress exactly as the act requires, and therefore they never
trigger the sixty-day clock. They generally report “consistent with but not pursuant to”
the act, a technicality that allows them to satisfy Congress’s interest in being informed
without tying their hands by starting the clock. When President George W. Bush informed Congress of the campaign against terrorism in response to the September 11
attacks, for instance, he did so “consistent with the War Powers Act” but not pursuant
to the act in a way that would begin the sixty-day clock. Nor have the courts stepped
in to help Congress here, normally avoiding such issues as “political questions” rather
than genuine legal or constitutional cases.
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How Do We Define a Foreign Policy Problem?
879
Despite its difficulties in enforcing the War
Powers Act, Congress has tried to play a fairly active role in foreign policy making, sometimes
working with a president, sometimes at odds.
The calculation for Congress is fairly straightforward: let the president pursue risky military
strategies. If he succeeds, take credit for staying
out of his way; if he fails, blame him for not consulting and for being “imperial.” Either way, Congress wins, or at least it doesn’t lose by seeming to
meddle in the affairs that many people see as the
president’s domain.15 Even after the Democrats
took control of Congress after the 2006 elections,
they were unable to alter Bush’s war policy in
Iraq, due to these kinds of barriers, and because
the president’s potential veto meant that they
needed a supermajority in both houses, not just
to mobilize their own simple majority of votes.
A Popularity Contest
American foreign policy making is just as crowded an arena as any other
WHO
aspect of American politics. Actors vie with each other to realize their
goals and manipulate the rules to get their way. The primary direct actors
WHAT
in the process are the president, the various executive bodies with foreign
HOW
policy authority, and Congress. To maximize their power and influence,
these actors use their constitutional powers where they can, the laws on the books, and
their power to create new laws. We have seen this most graphically in the power struggle between the president and Congress, illustrated by the politics surrounding the
War Powers Act.
HOW DO WE DEFINE A FOREIGN POLICY PROBLEM?
The War Powers Act of 1973
requires the president to inform
Congress of any military engagements. Congress’s ability to stop
the president, however, is very
limited. Other than cutting off
funding, the best they can do is
vote on a resolution of support.
Shown in this image from television
is the vote total for U.S. House
Resolution 104, voted on by the
members of the U.S. House of
Representatives in March 2003.
House members approved their
support for President Bush and
the U.S. military troops fighting
in the U.S.-led attack on Iraq.
The actors we have just discussed work in a very distinctive political environment that
helps them decide when a foreign situation constitutes a problem, and when and how
it should be acted on. Most foreign policy is either action to correct something we
don’t like in the world or reaction to world events. How do policymakers in Washington, members of the media, or average citizens on the street decide what is sufficiently
important to Americans and American interests that a foreign policy should be made?
What makes the United States act or react?
The answer is complex. First, over the years a distinctive American approach to foreign policy has developed that reflects our view of our global role, our values, and our
political goals. Because of inherent tensions among these roles, values, and goals, our
approach to foreign policy is not always entirely consistent. Foreign policy is also
shaped by politics, plain and simple. The political context in which American foreign
policy is forged involves the actors we have just met, in combination with pressures
both global and domestic. In this section we explore our distinctive approach to foreign policy and then examine the variety of global and domestic pressures that help
to define American foreign policy problems.
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880
Chapter 19 Foreign Policy
THE AMERICAN STYLE OF FOREIGN POLICY
American foreign policy goals have consistently included the promotion of democracy, capitalism, and free trade. At the same time, the record of American foreign
policy is full of inconsistencies. We change allies and friends from time to time. For
example, Japan and Germany were enemies of the United States during World War
II, while the Soviet Union was an ally. After World War II, those positions switched:
Japan and Germany became our friends, whereas until the 1990s the Soviet Union
was our enemy. After 1950 the United States supported Taiwan as the true China,
then switched in 1979 and recognized the People’s Republic and the government in
Beijing. In 1979, Iranian revolutionaries held fifty-four Americans hostage in the
U.S. embassy for over one year; less than a decade later, the United States sold arms
to Iran. Likewise, the United States sold weapons to Iraq in the 1980s, and then went
to war against it in 1990 and again in 2003. These inconsistencies in American foreign policy are partly due to the fact that international and domestic pressures are
not static; they change over time, sometimes presenting challenges to the United
States and sometimes opportunities, sometimes forcing action, sometimes preventing action. But the inconsistencies in American foreign policy also result from three
underlying tensions in Americans’ ideas about the world: global activism, moral values, and conflicting goals. These tensions help create a distinctive “American” approach to foreign policy.
Global Activism The first tension concerns the way Americans see their global role.16 An
hegemon the dominant actor
in world politics
internationalism a foreign
policy based on taking an
active role in global affairs;
the predominant foreign policy
view in the United States today
American military presence hovers over many areas of the globe, we are a major exporter of goods and services, and American culture has spread throughout the world.
In fact the United States is so involved and so powerful that it is often called a hegemon, or the dominant actor in world politics. Much of this involvement is a matter of
choice. Since World War II, American leaders and the public have believed that it is important for the United States to play an active role in global affairs, a philosophy known
as internationalism. Internationalism is still the predominant foreign policy view in
this country. In 2002, 96 percent of the nation’s leaders thought that the United States
should take an active world role; in a 2006 survey, 69 percent of the public agreed.17
Critics of internationalism argue that when the United States gets involved in
other countries’ affairs, it often ends up with worse results than if it did nothing.
The covert operation against Salvador Allende in Chile in the early 1970s is an example: in attempting to keep a constitutionally elected left-wing Marxist government from taking control, the United States helped a right-wing repressive regime
come to power. This isolationist impulse has perhaps been on the rise since the end
of the Cold War.18
Both courses of action have benefits and costs. The main benefit of internationalism is that the United States can steer the courses of others in ways it likes; the primary
cost is that it drains attention and resources from domestic policy. The primary benefit of isolationism is that it keeps the United States from being bogged down in someone else’s problems; the primary cost is that their problems could become ours. American policymakers have responded to this dilemma by being inconsistent; at times they
support internationalism, and at times they support isolationism.
Moral Values A second tension that makes American foreign policy seem inconsistent
is the dispute over whether American foreign policy should be guided more by pracUncorrected page proof. Copyright (c) 2009 by CQ Press, a division of SAGE. CQ Press is a registered trademark of Congressional Quarterly Inc. No part of these pages may be quoted, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
How Do We Define a Foreign Policy Problem?
881
tical or by moral considerations. Moral statements try to define particular actions as
right or wrong. For example, although many people believe that under certain circumstances going to war is the moral thing to do—for example, to defend America
from foreign invasion or to stop human rights violations in another country—most
people also consider it wrong to attack innocent civilians while fighting a war. An important question for Americans is whether foreign policy should be constrained by
moral guidelines and, if so, to what extent the government should be bound by those
essentially self-imposed restrictions.
Just as Americans and their foreign policy leaders have fluctuated between internationalism and isolationism over time, so too have we flip-flopped between emphasizing morality and practicality in foreign policy.19 For example, under President Carter
the moral component of American foreign policy found its way into policies reducing
the number of arms America exported abroad, promoting human rights, improving
our relations with the Soviets, and pulling back our support of repressive regimes,
even though we might have supported them in the past for being anticommunist.20
Congress was also very assertive in this period, cutting military and economic aid to
countries that did not support human rights. When President Reagan, much more of
a pragmatist, came to power, he reversed much of what President Carter had done. For
instance, in El Salvador, where Carter had tried to get tough on a repressive regime,
Reagan put the fight against communism first and so backed the existing regime—
death squads and all—rather than push for human rights and risk “losing” part of
Central America to communism.
Conflicting Goals A final tension affecting the American approach to foreign policy
concerns three basic goals the United States tries to pursue: defending the homeland
(security), encouraging the growth of our economy (economic), and supporting democracy in the world (political).21 Sometimes these goals cannot be attained simultaneously and we have to choose which goal we want to give priority to. One of the key
flash points has been between the protection of political goals (particularly human
rights) and security goals (containment). Despite its preference for taking the moral
high ground, in practice the United States was largely willing to work with any anticommunist leader and country, regardless of its domestic policies on human rights.
This led us into strategic alliances with some countries that were not only not democratic but in fact quite repressive, the Philippines being one such example. And, indeed, the United States has forged links with nondemocratic regimes, such as Pakistan
and Saudi Arabia, as part of the war against terrorism.
The current war on terrorism highlights nicely the tension between conflicting U.S.
goals. When President Bush talked of the important role of the United States in promoting democratic change and extending human liberty around the globe, he drew
on very “idealistic” principles often associated with President Woodrow Wilson after
World War I. At the same time, though, his administration’s willingness to use torture
against suspected terrorists cut at the very heart of the U.S. commitment to human
rights and dignity.22 Finding the right balance between safety and security and liberty
and freedom is a constant challenge to democratic governments.
GLOBAL PRESSURES
In addition to being influenced by the distinctive culture of American foreign policy,
policy problems are defined by the combination of global and domestic pressures we
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882
Chapter 19 Foreign Policy
The Power of Words
The United States wields its power
in the international arena in a number of ways. One way is by engaging in diplomatic talks with other
countries to get them to agree to
what the U.S. officials want. Here,
Iranian, European and U.S. officials
begin talks in July 2008 in Geneva
in a bid to resolve the dispute over
Tehran’s nuclear program. Iran’s top
nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili
(left), is pictured with European
Union Foreign Policy Chief Javier
Solana (right) and U.S. Undersecretary of State William Burn
(third on the right).
spoke of earlier. Global pressure is exerted by external forces, events that take place
outside America. Although the United States is an independent sovereign nation and
a global superpower, it is also just one state in a larger system of states. All the states,
plus other actors such as the United Nations, together comprise the international system. The nature of the international system has an impact on what sorts of things are
defined as problems requiring action or reaction from America.23 Here we discuss
briefly some characteristics of that system.
Anarchy and Power The international political system is characterized by two concepts
we discussed in Chapter 1: anarchy and power. Anarchy is a theory of politics that
holds that there should be no laws at all. In the international context, this means that
there is no central authority that individual nations must obey. International laws are
effective only to the degree that nations agree to be bound by them. Since they cannot
be enforced, except by military might, they are more like conventions than laws. When
nations get into conflicts with each other, there is no organization that can authoritatively resolve them without the cooperation of those nations themselves. Even though
there is a world court—the International Court of Justice—the impact of its rulings
and those of other world judicial bodies depends on the willingness of countries to
abide by them.
The condition of anarchy has special implications for what Americans define as foreign policy problems. First, because power is what ultimately counts, the United States
has taken care to build on its natural advantages to become a very powerful country,
rather than counting on other states to defend it should the need arise, as smaller, less
wealthy nations sometimes have to do. Although we are involved in international organizations like NATO, we also have the capacity to act on our own, without the cooperation or consent of our allies if need be. Second, American foreign policy has tended
to focus on the behavior and actions of other nations, rather than international organizations, since that is where the competing areas of power are. It is other states that pose
a military threat, and so other states are most likely to be at the center of our foreign
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How Do We Define a Foreign Policy Problem?
883
policy problems (although in recent years nonstate actors like international terrorists
have also become a focus of American foreign policy, especially as they are increasingly
able to obtain weapons of mass destruction). Finally, since power has traditionally been
defined first and foremost in military terms, we tend to put a priority on threats to our
security.24 Security issues often become the primary focus of our foreign policy.
Economic Interdependence Even though the nations of the world are politically independent, more and more they are economically interdependent—that is, most of the
national economies of the world are linked together through the trade of goods and
services and currencies. As the global stock market panic following the collapse of the
U.S. credit market in the fall of 2008 makes painfully clear, ups and downs in one
economy tend to be felt throughout the global economy, which has a hand in shaping
our foreign policy.25 The United States sells some of the goods it makes to actors outside the country, and individuals and companies inside the United States buy other
products from abroad. Between domestic production and foreign trade, our economy
often prospers, but we are increasingly dependent on what other countries do, and we
are vulnerable to the effects of the economic crises they might encounter.
The United States played a pivotal role in setting up the current world economic system in 1944, in a meeting that took place in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. The
meeting brought together forty-four countries (notably not including the Soviet
Union), under the leadership of the United States, to design a system that would regulate international trade and the international money system, and help restore war-ravaged Europe. The participating countries agreed to found a global economic system
based on the principles of capitalism at home and free trade between states. Free trade
means that countries exchange goods across their borders without imposing taxes and
tariffs that make goods from another country more expensive than those made at
home. Because such measures protect their home producers at the expense of the
global market, the imposition of such restrictions is known as protectionism.
The Bretton Woods system,
an example of a strategic economic policy, set up three key
economic institutions that
continue to play a central role
in the global economy:
• The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was created to make relatively small
and short-term loans to
help balance the flow of
currency in and out of
countries. Originally the
IMF focused on making
loans to address balance-ofpayments deficits. While it
still does so, increasingly the
IMF and World Bank work
together on massive loans
for economic restructuring.
free trade economic system by
which countries exchange goods
without imposing excessive
tariffs and taxes
protectionism the imposition
of trade barriers, especially
tariffs, to make trading
conditions favorable to
domestic producers
International Monetary Fund
(IMF) economic institution that
makes short-term, relatively
small loans to countries to help
balance their currency flows
Money Makes the
World Go ‘Round
Global economic interdependence
was never more evident than in late
2008, when a financial crisis in the
United States triggered stock losses
worldwide. Fears of a global recession pummeled world markets.
Representative of what was
happening everywhere, Tokyo’s
Nikkei stock index plunged more
than 11 percent October 16, 2008,
the biggest loss in two decades.
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884
Chapter 19 Foreign Policy
World Bank economic
institution that makes large,
low-cost loans with long
repayment terms to countries,
primarily for infrastructure
construction or repairs
• The World Bank, or International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, was
created to make large loans with long repayment terms and better interest rates
than those available from banks. It addresses the needs of building and rebuilding
economic infrastructure in countries—roads, dams, ports, bridges, and so on.
General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade (GATT) a series of
agreements on international
trading terms; now known as
the World Trade Organization
(WTO)
most favored nation the status
afforded to WTO trading
partners; a country gives the
same “deal” to member nations
that it offers to its “most
favored” friend
• The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (or GATT, which has now evolved
into the World Trade Organization, or WTO) was an agreement about the terms
on which member countries would trade with each other. At the heart of GATT
was the principle of most favored nation, which meant that a country gives the
same “deal” to all other GATT members as it gives to its “most favored” friend. The
idea was to develop a multilateral trade organization that would work over time to
move toward freer and freer trade among member nations.
By the 1970s, however, it was becoming increasingly difficult to manage the world
economy. First, other countries such as Japan were becoming more powerful economically. Second, some less-developed countries felt that free trade gave countries
like the United States and Europe an advantage, and they wanted to protect their markets. Finally, the U.S. leadership role was not as strong as it was originally. The United
States was beginning to pay larger costs to maintain the system, and its own economy
was losing strength.26
The world economy affects the definition of foreign policy problems in several
ways. First, Americans seek to preserve the capitalist free trade system, partly for ideological reasons and partly because of its benefits. Inevitably the United States gets
into conflicts with states that want some limits on free trade. For example, when Japan
put up protectionist barriers that made it harder for American companies to sell their
products in Japan, American foreign policy aimed to get Japan to remove or at least
reduce these barriers. One should note that the United States also uses protectionist
measures to insulate the U.S. economy from foreign competition. For example, “domestic content” rules on automobiles require that a certain percentage of a car’s components be built or assembled in the United States.
And the public can have strong views about the role of U.S. foreign policy in promoting economic interests. In 2004, 78 percent of those surveyed in the general public
thought it was a very important role of U.S. foreign policy to protect American jobs and
workers, while 73 percent thought it was to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. Only 41
percent of the nation’s “leaders” in the survey thought it was the purpose of foreign policy to protect jobs and workers, however, and 87 percent thought we ought to stop the
spread of nuclear weapons.27 The public is clearly more worried than their leaders about
the “outsourcing” of jobs abroad, in which generally high-wage jobs that had been held
at home by Americans are shipped overseas, where wages are lower. Some studies predict that by 2015 as many as three million jobs could be lost to overseas.28 While not
everyone agrees with this prediction, it certainly is the case that the complexity of globalization and the imperatives of international economic competition can run secondary
to the sense of the public that their jobs are being taken and that it is the role of foreign
policy to do something about it. This creates tough conflicts for policymakers.
U.S. foreign policy makers also address the challenge of aiding and shaping the
economies of Eastern Europe and the fifteen states that emerged out of the former Soviet Union. All of these countries had centrally planned economies, in which the government basically determined what goods would be produced, how much they would
cost, how they would be distributed, and what workers’ wages would be. Since the fall
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How Do We Define a Foreign Policy Problem?
885
of the Soviet Union, the eastern countries are no longer isolated economically from
the rest of the world. As a result, many American entrepreneurs see the possibility of
expanding their markets into these countries, and the U.S. government wants to facilitate the growth of democracy in these states and increase their stability by giving
them economic aid.
A final international economic factor that affects U.S. foreign policy is the state of
the economies in the rest of the world. One problem here is a worsening of the terms
of trade—the relative level over time of the prices a country receives for its exports
compared with the prices it pays for the products it imports. The prices that developing countries receive for their exports can vary dramatically in the short run; an
entire year’s crop can be wiped out by drought or floods. Furthermore, these countries’ prices probably decrease in the long run. Meanwhile, the prices these countries
pay for imports, typically manufactured goods, tend only to increase in the long run.
This leaves many developing economies in a difficult spot, to say the least. The main
goal for the United States is to guarantee itself access to these markets, maximizing
its profits, without alienating developing nations. The United States does try to help
struggling economies with foreign aid, but there are concerns about whether such aid
is effective.29
DOMESTIC PRESSURES
Global pressures are not the only ones that shape what is defined as a foreign policy
problem. Three important forces within America can have an influence on government policymakers: public opinion, the media, and interest groups.
Public Opinion Public opinion influences foreign policy in a number of ways. First,
since broad-based public beliefs are relatively stable, public opinion can limit drastic
changes in foreign policy because decision makers believe the public will not stand for
a radical new policy direction.30 This is the case particularly when it comes to taking
risks that can lead to U.S. casualties—Americans might quickly reject a policy if the
costs in human lives are high. Second, public opinion matters in foreign policy because, on occasion, changes in public opinion actually help bring about changes in
foreign policy. For example, people supported the idea of recognizing the People’s Republic of China long before President Carter changed our strategic policy toward
China and decided to recognize it; the public became vocally dissatisfied with Vietnam
policy before U.S. leaders did; and popular support for a nuclear freeze preceded President Reagan’s resumption of nuclear arms control negotiations with the Soviet
Union.31 Third, public opinion may be used as a bargaining chip in diplomacy. Here
the idea is that a leader negotiating policies with other countries’ leaders can use public opinion to set limits on what positions are acceptable.
The Media The media also exert domestic pressure on the definition of American
foreign policy problems. All media sources cover foreign policy, but their role is
limited for three reasons: the media must also pay attention to domestic issues; the
media are effective only to the point that people actually pay attention to what they
say; and the government can limit the media’s coverage of certain sensitive stories,
as it did during the Persian Gulf War in 1990–1991, the war in Afghanistan (2001),
and the ongoing war in Iraq. Generally, foreign news is shrinking as a percentage
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886
Pressure in Numbers?
Several thousand antiwar
demonstrators fill Waterfront Park
in downtown Portland, Oregon,
in mid-March 2003, to protest a
possible war with Iraq. Although
their voices did not prevent
the war, public opinion of the
protracted conflict continued to
get more critical over the next
couple of years and forced the
Bush administration to defend
its policies.
Chapter 19 Foreign Policy
of the news. For example, ABC’s nightly news foreign coverage dropped from 3,733
minutes in 1989 to 1,838 minutes in 1996—and ABC offers the most foreign coverage of the three major networks.32 Some of this drop in coverage has been picked
up by the Internet and twenty-four-hour news networks. The aftermath of the September 2001 terrorist attacks made some foreign coverage more relevant to Americans, although much of the coverage focused on domestic issues or American concerns overseas, and in recent years, coverage of foreign news has declined to
pre-9/11 levels.
The relationship between the media and the government in foreign policy is a twoway street. First, the media can influence the government by providing policymakers
with pertinent information. Policymakers learn much in their daily talks with journalists. This appears to have been the case during the operations in Somalia and Haiti,
when the military commanders learned a lot about what was going on around them
from reporters and CNN.33 Second, the media can stimulate changes in elite attitudes,
which are then dispersed throughout society. The coverage of the famine in Somalia
in 1991, for example, appears to have had an impact on President George H. W. Bush,
who decided that the United States must do something to help. He then sold this policy to the American public.34 Third, the media can create foreign policy issues that the
government must deal with. By focusing the public’s attention on a problem, such as
pictures of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets in Somalia in
October 1993, the media can in a sense create a problem to which policymakers must
respond quickly.
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any means, electronic
using foreign
or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
policy strategies to persuade, or
How Do We Define a Foreign Policy Problem?
887
However, the government can also influence the media. Government officials can
give cues to the media as to what the government leaders think is important and
should be told to the public—they can leak stories or put a certain spin or interpretation on a story. And since CNN and other networks carry live news briefings, the administration can speak for hours directly to the public. The government can also restrict access to information as it has done during the war on terrorism. The media rely
heavily on official sources for information on foreign affairs. Recent revelations that
some reporters were secretly on the government payroll to promote administration
policies, and the recognition that especially in matters of foreign affairs the government sometimes gives false news to confuse our enemies (but also potentially confusing us) shows how blurry the line between the media and the government can get. On
the other hand, as the media communicate even faster with the public, leaders in
Washington feel the pressure to act equally quickly, which can make for hasty and less
effective foreign policy.35
Interest Groups The final source of domestic pressure that helps define foreign policy
problems comes from interest groups. Some groups are issue focused, like Human
Rights Watch, which monitors and advocates human rights policy, and USA*Engage,
which generally opposes U.S. economic sanctions and supports free trade. Many
groups are organized around diaspora, or ethnic groups in the United States, with a
common ethnic or religious background or homeland. These groups lobby for foreign
policies related to their countries of origin. Such groups have become increasingly active in recent years. For example, Cuban Americans lobby about U.S. policy toward
Cuba, and both Jewish Americans and Arab Americans lobby for policies that affect
the Middle East. Iraqi exiles also worked hard to promote the policy of “regime
change” to oust Saddam Hussein from power.36
Organized interest groups representing the interests of big businesses that compete
for defense contracts tend to be especially powerful. The interesting thing about policymaking in this area is that here the president and the Pentagon on the one hand, and
members of Congress on the other hand, tend to share an interest in increased defense
spending. Policy therefore tends to be made in fairly nonconfrontational ways. This
mutual interest among defense groups and contractors,
Congress, and the Pentagon is an example of the iron triangle policy relationship we noted in other chapters. While
this metaphor might be too strong, it nevertheless illustrates
the roles that interest groups can play in foreign policy.37
The Influence of
Interest Groups
Interest groups bring the concerns
and opinions of individuals to the
attention of political officials, and
this is just as true for U.S. foreign
policy as it is for domestic policy.
In June 2008, the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee hosted
Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert,
at its 2008 policy conference.
Olmert told American Jewish
leaders that he hoped renewed
contacts with Syria would lead
to peace talks that could transform
the Middle East.
Defining foreign policy problems is the business of the foreign policy actors who are influWHAT
enced by interests and pressures from both inside the United States and abroad. Their goal
HOW
is to focus on problems that are supported by
the prevailing American ideology about our role in the
world and are consistent with American values and goals.
To some extent, they must work within a distinctive culture
of American foreign policy. At the same time, they are buffeted by global and domestic political pressures that help to
determine which foreign situations can be defined as solvable policy problems, and which cannot.
WHO
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Chapter 19 Foreign Policy
HOW DO WE SOLVE FOREIGN POLICY PROBLEMS?
Most U.S. foreign policies are designed to influence other actors in the world to act in
a manner consistent with American goals.38 Once foreign policy makers have defined
a situation as a problem, they have to make key decisions about how best to approach
it and what sort of instrument to use: political, economic, or military. We explore each
of these in turn, after we examine the different approaches open to policymakers.
STRATEGIES: DETERRENCE, COMPELLENCE, AND PREEMPTION
deterrence maintaining military
might so as to discourage
another actor from taking
a certain action
compellence using foreign
policy strategies to persuade, or
force, an actor to take a certain
action
coercive diplomacy the
calibrated use of threats of
the use of force aimed to make
another actor stop or undue
an aggressive action
preemption action that strikes
and eliminates an enemy before
it has a chance to strike you
preventive war to use force
without direct provocation in
order to assure that a chain of
events does not unfold that
could put you at immediate
risk at some later date
Traditionally, foreign policy makers could use two accepted strategies to influence
other political actors: deterrence and compellence. The goal of deterrence is to prevent another actor from doing something it might be expected to do.39 Earlier in this
chapter we saw that the United States spent a great deal of money on military weapons
from the end of World War II until about 1989 to deter the Soviet Union from attacking Western Europe. The cost of the nuclear program alone from 1940 to 1996 was
$5.5 trillion.40 This is an example of deterrence because the United States employed
threats to prevent the Soviets from doing something that the United States did not
want them to do.
The goal of compellence, on the other hand, is to get another actor to do something that it might otherwise not do, such as starting a new policy or stopping an existing one.41 For example, after the war in the Persian Gulf between Iraq and a U.S.-led
multinational coalition of states, the United States wanted Iraq to stop producing
weapons of mass destruction (biological, chemical, and nuclear), and to destroy the
weapons it had already stockpiled. The United Nations imposed strict economic sanctions on Iraq, prohibiting other countries from trading with Iraq until compliance
with the international demands was verified. When, in December 1998, the United
States had reason to believe that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had resumed production of
weapons of mass destruction, it began bombing raids to destroy Iraq’s weapons-producing capacity. Both economic sanctions and military strikes were foreign policies of
compellence, designed to force Iraq to disarm, to increase global security, and perhaps
to overthrow Hussein, thereby making democratic reform possible.
Foreign policies can deter or compel in positive or negative ways. We often refer to
foreign policies as “carrots” or “sticks.” A carrot, or positive foreign policy, is a reward
or a promise to do something nice for another country, or to lift a punishment or
sanction. Good examples of positive foreign policy are economic or foreign aid and
increased opportunities for trade and commerce. A stick, or negative foreign policy, is
a punishment or a threat to enact a punishment, or the withdrawal of an existing reward. The U.S. government frequently cuts off or diminishes foreign aid to countries
as a form of punishment. The careful manipulation of threats of the use of force as a
form of negotiation, while hoping to avoid war, is often called coercive diplomacy.42
In 2002, President George W. Bush added a third foreign policy to the mix—one
that seemed to break with previous practice and with the way international law had
generally been understood to that point. The new strategy was one of preemption,
striking an enemy and removing it from action before it has the chance to strike you.
The administration uses the word preemption, indicating the need to act now to stop
an immediate and imminent threat, but the strategy may be better thought of as waging preventive war, waging war now so as to prevent a sequence of events that could
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How Do We Solve Foreign Policy Problems?
889
pose a threat later. Bush’s strategy was based on the idea that some enemies cannot be
deterred or compelled to act appropriately because they are motivated by implacable
hate for the United States. If we know that such an enemy, either a hostile state or a
stateless entity like a terrorist network, has the means to attack the United States or
U.S. interests and to do horrible damage—using weapons of mass destruction such as
chemical or biological weapons, for example—then there is no point in waiting for
them to strike first. In fact, Bush’s position is that the United States has a duty to act
first in such a situation, lest America and the world suffer the consequences of inaction. Bush asserted that he was willing to act preemptively and unilaterally, if necessary, to prevent such first strikes.
The new strategy was announced shortly after Bush had asked the United Nations
to pass a resolution allowing force to be used to remove Hussein from power in Iraq,
again for his failure to allow weapons inspections and, it was thought, for continuing
to develop those weapons. In a 2002 document titled “The National Security Strategy
of the United States of America,” Bush made it clear, however, that he would act alone
if the United Nations failed to approve the action. The policy was immediately controversial, as critics both at home and abroad pointed out that it set a dangerous precedent and argued that Bush should not ignore his allies. Many critics of the plan worry
that it puts tremendous pressure on the government to “get it right” when it comes to
intelligence, and to get it right early—since there’s no time to wait. Others are concerned that this could lead to a dangerous new reality in international relations, where
“shooting first and asking questions later” becomes the new norm. Nevertheless, Bush
was resolved to act, and the new policy of preemption was put into effect in Iraq in
2003, although it turned out, in retrospect, that Hussein had not in fact begun his nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs again as had been feared.
FOREIGN POLICY INSTRUMENTS
Once leaders in Washington decide to make a foreign policy, they can take a wide
range of actions.43 That is, once the president or Congress has decided to deter, compel, or preempt a country and has decided to use a positive or negative action, a menu
of practical options is open to them. These actions can be grouped into three main
categories: political, economic, and military. Preemptive action is likely to be exclusively military. Each category contains several instruments.
Political Instruments Political instruments include propaganda, diplomacy, and covert
operations. Propaganda is the promotion of information designed to influence the beliefs and attitudes of a foreign audience. The hope behind American propaganda is
that the people of the targeted foreign country will view America more favorably or
will apply pressure on their government to act more democratically. Propaganda is a
form of communication that can be conducted via the media—radio broadcasts, television, film, pamphlets—or through scholarly exchanges, such as speaking tours of
Americans abroad or tours given to foreign officials visiting the United States. American efforts at what is sometimes called “public diplomacy” are relatively new. The Voice
of America began broadcasting in 1942, Radio Free Europe (to Eastern Europe) in
1951, and Radio Liberty (to the Soviet Union) in 1953. Much of U.S. propaganda is the
responsibility of the United States Information Agency (USIA), also established in
1953.44 More recent additions to American propaganda efforts are Radio Marti and TV
Marti, directed toward Cuba, and now, Radio Free Afghanistan.
propaganda the promotion
of information, which may or
may not be correct, designed
to influence the beliefs and
attitudes of a foreign audience
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Chapter 19 Foreign Policy
diplomacy the formal system
of communication and
negotiation between countries
Diplomacy, formal communication and negotiation between countries, is a second
political tool—perhaps the oldest political tool of the United States. The State Department is primarily responsible for American diplomatic activities.45 Diplomats perform a variety of functions. They represent America at ceremonies abroad, gather information about what is going on in foreign countries, and conduct negotiations with
foreign countries. Diplomats can often be recognized in media accounts by titles like
“ambassador,” “special envoy,” and “special representative.”
Diplomacy is a tricky business in many ways, including the decision of whether or
not to talk to those nations we view as enemies, as we discussed in “What’s at Stake?”
at the beginning of this chapter. But even when we know we want to open communications, spreading Washington’s message abroad and correctly interpreting other
countries’ messages can be difficult. An infamous meeting took place during the summer of 1990 between U.S. ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie and Iraqi leader Saddam
Hussein; the conversation may have led Hussein to believe that the United States was
prepared to let the Persian Gulf states deal with their own interests themselves, which
implied (incorrectly as it turned out) that the United States would not get involved in
Persian Gulf disputes. This interpretation may have been seen by Hussein as a green
light to proceed as he wished in the Gulf and facilitated the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
A more recent example may be seen in the apparent divisions within the Bush administration between “hawks” like then–Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz,
who were more willing to act forcefully and unilaterally against Iraq, and more moderate actors like former secretary of state Colin Powell, who wished to pursue a more
diplomatic and multilateral approach to global problems in general and Iraq in particular. When she became secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice seemed to weigh in on
the Powell side, traveling around the world to press the message that the United States
stands for freedom and liberty, in part as a way to combat the image of the country as
an aggressive military force in world affairs.
The importance of diplomacy has been lessened today by two important developments: the technological revolution in communications and transportation, and increasing scrutiny by the media. Faster communications mean that if an American
president wants to talk to the French prime minister, the German chancellor, or the
Russian president, all he needs to do is pick up the phone. Indeed, following the attacks of September 11, Russian president Vladimir Putin was the first to call President
Bush to offer his sympathies and support. Faster transportation means that the secretary of state or the secretary of defense or the president can fly anywhere at any time
when negotiations or meetings need to take place within hours. These technological
developments have made shuttle diplomacy possible as heads of state or their personal
envoys travel back and forth to deal directly with one another and have to some extent
taken the professional diplomats out of the loop.
Broader publicity as a result of greater media attention has also diminished the effectiveness of diplomacy. Sometimes diplomacy needs to be started, if not undertaken
completely, in secret. Secrecy allows the diplomats to explore various bargaining positions without initially having to worry about whether those positions are politically
feasible and publicly supported back home. Today, that secrecy is much harder to obtain. For instance, the constant publicity around the peace processes in the Middle
East and Northern Ireland provides leaders with opportunities to score points with
their constituencies rather than buckle down and hammer out an agreement.
A final type of political tool, one with potential military implications, covert operations are undercover actions in which the United States is a primary mover, although
covert operations undercover
actions in which the prime
mover country appears to
have had no role
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How Do We Solve Foreign Policy Problems?
it does not appear to have had any role at all. The main ingredients in a covert operation are secrecy (the covert part) and the appearance that the U.S. government has
nothing to do with the action. The CIA is the American agency primarily charged with
conducting covert operations, although in recent years the Defense Department has
become more engaged in this area as well. Covert operations can take several forms.46
Efforts to assassinate foreign leaders are one example. Perhaps the leader most often
on the receiving end of such efforts is Fidel Castro, who came to power in Cuba in
1959. However, the United States and many other countries view such actions as ineffective, with the added disincentive of seeming to invite retaliation on their own chief
executives. President Gerald Ford banned such efforts by executive order in 1976. So
despite calls to assassinate Saddam Hussein, such an attempt was never implemented.
Covert operations also involve efforts to change the governments of countries the
United States does not like, by facilitating a coup d’état—an internal takeover of
power by political or military leaders—against the ruling government. Examples include the overthrows of the Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953
and of Chilean president Salvador Allende in the early 1970s. A final example of covert
political operations is meddling in foreign countries’ elections, for example, by giving
money to a political party for the purpose of helping U.S.-preferred candidates to win
and keeping others out of power.
The secrecy of covert operations is worth touching on because, more than any
other instrument of foreign policy available to U.S. policymakers, this policy instrument seems to be at odds with democratic principles—aside from the fact that covert
operations often involve illegal or unethical undertakings. Only beginning in the
1970s did the media and Congress begin to seek out information on covert operations. In 1980, President Carter signed into law the Intelligence Oversight Act, which
was intended to keep Congress informed. If anything, the bits of information that do
surface have contributed to the increasing public opinion that conspiracies abound in
American politics.
Economic Instruments We have already touched briefly on the two basic economic in-
struments available to foreign policy makers: foreign aid and economic sanctions (see
Figure 19.3). Foreign aid is economic aid
or military assistance given from the
United States (or other countries) to
poorer states; here we focus primarily on
economic aid. Foreign aid became a major
part of U.S. foreign policy after World War
II when the United States instituted the
Marshall Plan. The war had devastated
the economies of Western Europe, and
with the consolidation of power by the
Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, Washington worried that economic instability
would contribute to political instability
and open the door to communism in the
west as well. Economic aid would bolster
the European economies and thus prevent
the spread of communism. The Marshall
Plan announced by Secretary of State
891
foreign aid assistance given by
one country to another in the
form of grants or loans
Marshall Plan America’s massive
economic recovery program for
Western Europe following World
War II
Building Peace and Prosperity
Former U.S. president Bill Clinton
greeted villagers after he visited
the Godino Health Center August 1,
2008, in Debre Zeit, Ethiopia.
Clinton visited Clinton Foundation
projects in four African countries.
Such a presence helps the U.S
image abroad, particularly in
countries with which the United
States has sometimes had strained
relations.
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Chapter 19 Foreign Policy
892
RUSSIA
CANADA
UNITED KINGDOM
BELARUS
GERMANY
FRANCE
SLOVENIA
CROATIA
SERBIA YUGOSLAVIA
GEORGIA
MACEDONIA
SYRIA
JORDAN IRAQ
NORTH
KOREA
SOUTH
KOREA JAPAN
PAKISTAN
Egypt
CUBA
MEXICO
CHINA
IRANAFGHANISTAN
SAUDI ARABIA
BURMA
SUDAN
VENEZUELA
COLOMBIA
1. Top ten countries with
which the U.S. trades, May 2008
CÔTE D’IVOIRE
FORMER LIBERIAN
REGIME OF
CHARLES TAYLOR
KENYA
D. R. CONGO
ZIMBABWE
2. Top ten recipients of economic
assistance, 2006
3. Countries faced with U.S.imposed economic sanctions,
as of September 2008
4. Countries that are on
list numbers 2 & 3 above
FIGURE 19.3:
U.S. Foreign Policy
Economic Instruments
George Marshall in June 1947 was the first major economic aid package designed to
help the ruined economies of Europe recover. While the plan was extended to the
Soviets, the United States knew the Soviet Union, with its communist economy, would
not accept the capitalist recovery plan. Indeed, the Soviets rejected the plan and forced
their newly acquired Eastern European satellites to join them. Thus the Marshall Plan
covered only Western Europe, and the Cold War division of Europe was made even
more distinct.
Since the Marshall Plan days, the United States has given money and assistance to
many countries around the world. Economic aid comes in three forms: grants, loans,
and technical assistance. Grants are gifts of aid. Loans are monies that must be paid
back (at least in theory) to the United States, though usually at very good interest rates
(much lower than you get on your Visa card). Technical assistance is the sending of
knowledgeable people to help with economic projects (such as construction, agriculture, and technology).
The United States gives foreign aid to strengthen foreign countries, to pursue developmental goals—such as improving a nation’s health care system, education system, or agricultural output; to promote international stability; and for humanitarian
reasons. Note, however, that there is a good deal of self-interest behind foreign aid
even though we sometimes think of foreign aid as an “altruistic” act.47 Many Americans believe we give too much aid. However, this is in part because many Americans
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How Do We Solve Foreign Policy Problems?
think that the U.S. government gives much more aid than it actually does. For instance, in one study, Americans thought aid constituted as much as 15 percent of the
federal budget, whereas in reality it is only about half of one percent of government
spending, and U.S. spending on foreign aid as a portion of its gross domestic product
(GDP) puts it near the bottom of a list of major countries that give aid.48 In terms of
actual amounts, the United States, which used to be the foremost aid donor, is now
fourth, behind Japan, Germany, and France.49 Furthermore, much of what we give in
foreign aid actually comes back home because we often grant aid to countries with the
provision that they buy goods and services from the United States.50
The second type of foreign economic instrument is economic sanctions. We discussed economic sanctions earlier, in our consideration of compellence policy toward
Iraq. In common parlance, economic sanctions are thought of as negative sanctions—
that is, as a punishment imposed on a nation, such as the economic sanctions enacted
by the U.S. against Cuba in 1960 in an effort to destabilize the Castro regime. During
the period 1914–1990, the United States enacted seventy-seven sanctions on various
countries, or about one per year.51 Economic sanctions have become a major foreign
policy tool since the end of the Cold War. Between 1993 and 1996, government estimates identify sixty-one American economic sanctions.52 A recent study finds the use
of sanctions increasing in recent years.53 The rise in sanctions may be explained as the
result of the decreasing utility of both political tools (as noted earlier) and the increased stakes and decreased public popularity involved with the use of military force.
The removal of sanctions, as the United States is about to do with North Korea as part
of an agreement to, it is hoped, end their nuclear weapons program, can be a way that
sanctions are used as a “carrot” as well.
One of the most serious forms of economic sanctions is an embargo, or the refusal
by one country to trade with another in order to force changes in the other country’s
behavior or to weaken it. In rare circumstances, all trade is forbidden except shipments of a purely humanitarian nature, such as medicine. This means that the country can neither export nor import goods. A classic example is the U.S. policy toward
Cuba. Since Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba’s 1959 revolution, the United States
has imposed heavy sanctions on the communist island so close to the Florida coast.
The United States currently has severe restrictions on the right of its citizens to travel
to the island and allows the sale of food and medicine from U.S. firms only under special circumstances. The Bush administration tightened the sanctions policy that had
been in place since Eisenhower and Kennedy were in office.
This use of embargoes and other economic sanctions raises a number of problems,
however. First, for such a sanction to have real teeth, most nations must go along. If
some countries refuse to observe the embargo, the targeted nation may do just fine
without trading with the United States. Second, the goal of economic sanctions is to
hurt the government so that it changes its policies. But negative sanctions often hurt
ordinary citizens, such as Iraqis who couldn’t get food and other imported items while
sanctions were in effect. Third, sanctions can alienate allies. For example, U.S. efforts
to enact a strong embargo against Cuba have hurt American relations with countries
that trade with Cuba, such as Canada. Finally, economic sanctions, because they prohibit exports to a particular country, may deprive U.S. companies of billions of dollars of export earnings. Overall, it may be more effective to use positive sanctions as a
tool of foreign policy, but giving rewards to change behavior may be politically unpalatable. For instance, many Americans cringe over opening trade relations with
China, believing it rewards that country for its many human rights violations.
893
economic sanctions restrictions
on trade imposed on one
country by another state or
group of states, usually as a
form of punishment or protest
embargo the refusal by one
country to trade with another
in order to force changes in
its behavior or to weaken it
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or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
894
nuclear triad the military
strategy of having a threepronged nuclear capability,
from land, sea, or air
Chapter 19 Foreign Policy
Military Instruments The final instrument of foreign policy available to policymakers
in Washington is military power. With the Cold War over, the United States has
emerged as the most powerful military state in the world, possessing a wide range of
technologically sophisticated weapons systems and developing new technologies for
the battlefields of the future. This military might has not been inexpensive to build
and maintain. Every year the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars on
defense: the Bush administration request for the 2009 defense budget totaled well over
$600 billion, when you add to the baseline budget the cost of operations in
Afghanistan and Iraq (which is budgeted separately) and the cost of defense programs
that are in other parts of the federal budget. This is about ten times as much as Russia spends and is about as much as the rest of the world spends combined.54
Military power can be used for its threat value, to deter or compel an adversary, or
to strike preemptively or in retaliation for an attack on us. The United States has used
its military in a variety of interventions, from small-scale conflicts such as bombing
Libya in 1986 to all-out war in Iraq in 2003. Every postwar president has sent U.S.
troops to fight abroad (see Table 19.1). These troops have been called into service
most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Interestingly, the commitment to such a large military is a relatively new phenomenon in American history. The United States has always been distrustful of a large
standing peacetime military. British occupation in the American colonies fed the
American conviction that there should not be an army during peacetime. Thus Americans mobilized large armies when needed, as at the outset of the two world wars, and
demobilized the troops after those wars ended. President Truman was one of the first
to believe that America should stay active in world affairs after World War II, and to
argue for a large and permanent military. Nevertheless, skepticism continued,
prompting President Dwight Eisenhower to warn about the growing influence of a
military-industrial complex in his presidential farewell address in January 1961.
In addition to a huge army, the United States also possesses the most sophisticated weapons of war. The United States was the first, and currently is the largest,
nuclear power in the world. America developed atomic weapons during World War
II and dropped two of the bombs on Japan, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August
1945, bringing an end to the war in the Pacific. American scientists quickly developed an even more powerful successor: the hydrogen bomb, also known as a nuclear
bomb.
The U.S. arsenal today still revolves around the notion of the nuclear triad. Like
three legs of a stool, some nuclear weapons are based on land (on intercontinental
ballistic missiles), some at sea (on missiles on board submarines), and some in the
air (to be dropped by aircraft like the B-2 Stealth bomber). In addition, nuclear warheads can be attached to cruise missiles that can be launched from the ground, sea,
or air. The idea is that even if one of these legs were destroyed or disabled by an
enemy, the others would still be able to retaliate against attack. This swift and assured retaliation is meant to deter an attack on the United States from ever happening in the first place.
U.S. nuclear weapons, the backbone of a policy of mutual assured destruction, or
MAD—may actually have helped keep the peace between the Americans and Soviets
after World War II, because the Soviets believed we would use these weapons if provoked.55 Even though President Bush and Russian president Putin agreed in May 2002
to reduce each country’s arsenal from about six thousand nuclear weapons to about
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How Do We Solve Foreign Policy Problems?
895
TABLE 19.1 Presidential Uses of Force Since 1981
PRESIDENT
YEAR
PLACE
ACTION
U.S. DEATHS
Reagan
1981
Libya
Shot down Libyan warplanes over Gulf of Sidra
0
Reagan
1982
Egypt
Deployed troops to the Sinai buffer zone between Egypt and Israel
0
Reagan
1982
Lebanon
Deployed Marines to assist the withdrawal of Palestinian Liberation
Organization forces
0
Reagan
1982
Lebanon
Deployed forces as part of multinational peacekeeping force
Reagan
1983
Egypt
Deployed AWACS radar planes after Libya bombed a city in
Sudan and invaded northern Chad
0
Reagan
1983
Grenada
Invaded in order to topple leftist government and to protect
American students
19
Reagan
1986
Libya
Engaged Libyan ships and missiles in clash over extent of Libya’s
territorial waters
0
273
Reagan
1986
Libya
Used air strikes to retaliate for terrorist activity
2
Reagan
1987
Persian Gulf
Engaged Iranian naval vessels
0
Reagan
1987
Persian Gulf
Attacked Iranian (armed) oil-drilling platform
0
Reagan
1988
Persian Gulf
Attacked Iranian (armed) oil-drilling platforms and naval vessels
0
Reagan
1988
Persian Gulf
Engaged Iranian naval craft and (mistakenly) shot down Iranian
commercial jetliner
0
Reagan
1988
Persian Gulf
Engaged Iranian naval vessels
0
Bush
1989
Philippines
Provided air support to suppress rebellion
0
Bush
1989
Panama
Invaded to topple and arrest Manuel Noriega
23
Bush
1990
Saudi Arabia
Deployed troops in Operation Desert Shield
84
Bush
1991
Kuwait
Launched Operation Desert Storm to force Iraqi forces to
withdraw from Kuwait
Bush
1992
Somalia
Started Operation Restore Hope to provide relief
Clinton
1993
Balkans
Authorized U.S. participation in enforcing no-fly zone over
Bosnia-Herzegovina
0
Clinton
1993
Macedonia
Sent ground troops to join UN forces
0
Clinton
1993
Iraq
Attacked Baghdad with cruise missiles in retaliation for alleged
Iraqi plot to assassinate George H. W. Bush
0
299
43
Clinton
1993
Haiti
Enforced UN blockade of Haiti with naval forces
4
Clinton
1995
Bosnia
Participated in air operations, then “IFOR,” a NATO-led
multinational force
1
Clinton
1998
Iraq
Launched air strikes (continuing)
0
Clinton
1999
Kosovo
Launched air strikes
0
Bush
2001
Afghanistan
Launched Operation Enduring Freedom
Bush
2003
Iraq
Launched Operation Iraqi Freedom
562
4,133
Source: Adapted from John T. Rourke, Ralph G. Carter, and Mark A. Boyer, Making American Foreign Policy, 2d ed. Copyright © 1996 by Times Mirror Higher
Education Group, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Dushkin/McGraw-Hill, a division of the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Updated by the authors.
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or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
896
peace dividend the expectation
that reduced defense spending
would result in additional funds
for other programs
Chapter 19 Foreign Policy
two thousand (each state is likely to store many of these weapons rather than destroy
them, however), each country’s goal is still deterrence.
Nuclear weapons, which can seem awesome because of their incredible destructive
power, are relatively cheap compared to more conventional weapons. War on a battlefield, like the war in Iraq begun in 2003, requires more expensive elements: tanks,
guns, planes, ships, and troops. Each F/A-18 Hornet, the Navy’s most advanced fighter
jet, for example, costs nearly $90 million; each of the Air Force’s new F-22 Raptors will
cost around $150 million.
These weapons of war can be used to deter attacks on the United States, as well as
to compel other actors to comply with American objectives.56 Sending troops to ports
of call in other countries is one way to show the world that the United States has an interest in what goes on in that country. For example, when the Chinese fired missiles
into the water near Taiwan on the eve of Taiwan’s 1996 presidential election, the United
States sent naval ships, including an aircraft carrier, to the region to bolster Taiwan and
symbolically warn the Chinese not to intervene. A second type of military compellence
is sending troops or weapons to another country to demonstrate that the United States
has a commitment to that country. U.S. troops in South Korea contribute to the security of that state by making North Korea think twice about an invasion.
Much of the violence that U.S. policymakers must contend with does not fit the
model of armies squaring off on a battlefield with defined limits between combatants
and noncombatants. Civil wars inside countries like the former Yugoslavia in the mid1990s and situations where a government faces ongoing violent resistance from organized groups inside its borders, like Colombia in 2002, are just two examples of
complicated challenges that U.S. policymakers face. The use of force in these settings
tends to revolve around unconventional means, like sniper attacks against a larger military force, or bombing runs on a force’s supply depots.
The United States has often tried to stay out of these situations, in part because our
military structure is not as well suited to this kind of activity as it is to conventional
warfare. The case of Somalia, where a peacekeeping mission led to gruesome U.S. casualties (the subject of the recent film Blackhawk Down), serves to underscore these
difficulties.
Special Operations Command in the Pentagon centralizes control over the various
units in the armed forces—such as the Army Rangers, the Navy SEALS, and groups
that focus on psychological operations—that prepare to fight in these unconventional
environments. Indeed, in recent years the Pentagon has paid increasing attention to
the means of unconventional warfare and has employed many of those means recently, notably in Afghanistan.
Many observers believed that the end of the Cold War would bring about a peace
dividend, a surplus of money formerly spent on defense that could be shifted into social issues. Early efforts to shrink the military and redefine its role in the post–Cold
War world proved contentious, however. Many people are dependent on the military
for jobs, and whole communities and local economies are founded on nearby military
bases. And who was to say that no new threats would arise, only to find a complacent
America disarmed and unready?
The attacks of September 11 appear to have closed this debate for the moment, as
the defense budget seems certain to continue to rise in order to fund an ongoing war
against terrorism, to replenish materiel used or damaged in the wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq, and to bring into the arsenal a new generation of sophisticated weapons. But
even with this war on terrorism—which seems to provide at least some focus for U.S.
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Foreign Policy Challenges
897
foreign policy—policymakers, scholars, and commentators alike still ask, What should
the military look like in the twenty-first century? How big should it be? What sorts of
conflicts should it be prepared to wage, with what types of weapons? These and other
questions that will play a large role in determining what U.S. foreign policy will look
like in the future are discussed in the next section.
American foreign policy makers have many options when it comes to
creating solid, effective policies. They may choose to use strategies of deWHAT
terrence, compellence, or preemption, and they may lure with a carrot or
brandish a stick. The foreign policy instruments open to them are politHOW
ical (propaganda, diplomacy, and covert operations), economic (foreign
aid and sanctions), and military (potential and actual use of force).
WHO
FOREIGN POLICY CHALLENGES
The foreign policy issues of the Cold War have not disappeared entirely, but they have
changed dramatically. Although no single threat on the scale of the old Soviet nuclear
arsenal exists today—and although the smaller and aging leftovers of that arsenal now
in Russian control are still dangerous—a variety of critical foreign policy issues still
face the United States.
TERRORISM
As we learned painfully on September 11, 2001, even superpowers are vulnerable to
external threats. A chief foreign policy issue today is dealing with the threat of terrorism. Terrorism is normally defined as an act of violence that specifically targets innocent civilians for the purpose of provoking widespread fear that will force government
to change its policies. Those who use terror as a tactic are not usually states, but rather
individuals or groups (though they may have state support) who face an opponent
much more powerful than they are. The U.S. government keeps a list of foreign terrorist organizations, such as al Qaeda, and a list of states that support terrorism, such
as Iran and Syria.
The attacks of September 11 and al Qaeda’s campaign against the United States and
U.S. interests abroad provide a classic case of terrorism. The goals of these attacks were
not so much to force U.S. policy change as to provoke U.S. reaction and fuel a rebellion against our Middle Eastern allies, many of which deny their own citizens basic
rights. Sometimes, however, states can use terrorist tactics against their own people as
a way to quash dissent. Iraq’s use of chemical warfare against minorities in that country is but one example.
Weapons of Terrorism Terrorists have used weapons as simple as box cutters and as
elaborate as bombs to kill citizens by striking undefended targets like office buildings and shopping malls. The attacks of September 11 were essentially low tech,
taking advantage of security weaknesses in our open society rather than relying on
advanced weaponry. There is, however, some concern that terrorists in the future
may gain access to more sophisticated and dangerous weapons of mass destruction, including chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons that can kill huge
terrorism an act of violence
that targets civilians for
the purpose of provoking
wide-spread fear that will
force government to change
its policies
weapons of mass destruction
nuclear, biological, or chemical
weapons that can kill huge
numbers of people at one time
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898
Chapter 19 Foreign Policy
superterrorism the potential
use of weapons of mass
destruction in a terrorist attack
numbers of people in one blow. We have witnessed a biological weapons attack in
the form of the anthrax spores put into the U.S. mail in 2001, and we have also seen
other isolated cases of biological and chemical attacks, such as the sarin nerve gas
attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995. The potential use of weapons of mass destruction in terrorist attacks has come to be called superterrorism.57 Approximately
two dozen countries possess these kinds of weapons, and there is growing concern
that some of these weapons could be bought or stolen by a terrorist group. Of particular concern to the United States are rogue states—countries like Iran, North
Korea, and a handful of others58 that break international norms and might produce, sell, or use these destructive weapons.59 Some of these rogue nations have
known or suspected links to terrorist organizations. A strong effort to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction will likely be a hallmark of U.S. foreign
policy for decades to come.
rogue states countries that
break international norms and
produce, sell, or use weapons
of mass destruction
antiterrorism measures to
protect and defend U.S. citizens
and interests from terrorist
attacks
Fighting Terrorism U.S. policy toward terrorism focuses on two fronts: antiterror and
counterterrorism activities to
stop terrorists from using force
and responding when they do
counterterror efforts. Antiterrorism measures are designed to protect and defend U.S.
citizens and interests from terrorist attacks. Metal detectors at airports and concrete
barricades in front of government buildings to prevent car bombings are examples.
Counterterrorism measures include a range of activities to stop terrorists from using
force and responding when they do. Examples include using electronic means to track
communications of terrorists, trying to cut off the flow of money to terrorist groups
by freezing bank accounts, bombing terrorist training sites, arresting those conspiring
to carry out such attacks, and arresting or bombing those who have in fact carried out
terrorist attacks. In the wake of September 11, all of these kinds of steps have been
taken, though the most prominent step was the military campaign in Afghanistan
against al Qaeda and the Taliban ruling forces that harbored al Qaeda and its leader,
Osama bin Laden.
Petals for Profit
For centuries Afghanistan farmers
have grown poppies for their
opium, which is then exported
worldwide to fuel the international
drug trade. A large percentage of
the profits earned has been used
to support terrorist activities in
the country and globally. For this
reason, the Afghan government
and the U.S. military destroy the
poppy fields before the flowers can
be harvested. Here, Mohammed
Agha has started his harvest early
to try and avoid the government
destroying his crop.
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Foreign Policy Challenges
899
Fighting terrorism is complicated. When a state attacks you, you know who did it,
and you have targets to hit in retaliation. And because states own targets of value, you
can try to deter aggression by having your own weapons aimed at them, saying, essentially, “Don’t attack me, or I’ll attack you right back.” Terrorists, on the other hand,
usually do not provide good targets and are often willing to die for their cause. Further complicating matters is the fact that terrorist organizations, like al Qaeda, are
often transnational—they exist across several states, and they can move across borders
with little notice. It is not clear whom to threaten or attack in response to a terrorist
attack waged by a stateless entity.
In the war on terrorism, the Bush administration tried to translate the strategies of
a state-based world where U.S. military can be brought to bear onto the nonstatebased world of global terrorism. By linking al Qaeda to the Taliban in Afghanistan, the
Bush administration was able to respond to the September 11 attacks by taking aim
against identifiable targets: not just known al Qaeda camps but also the Taliban forces
and government. They tried to make a similar link to Iraq as part of the lead-up to
war. How this “war” will unfold as it moves beyond Afghanistan and Iraq, however, remains to be seen. (See the box “Global War on Terrorism.”)
Defending Ourselves at Home Another important component of the war on terrorism
is organizational and bureaucratic in nature: how do we organize our government’s efforts to fight terrorism and prevent future attacks and future intelligence failures? President Bush created the Office of Homeland Security in October 2001 and appointed
Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge as its head. After initially resisting the notion, Bush
proposed that the office be converted to a cabinet-level department in 2002, and, as we
mentioned earlier, in March 2003 the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was
born. This new department brought together twenty-two agencies and bureaus that
had been scattered across the landscape of the federal government but that all have
something to do with defending the homeland and responding to emergencies. The
Coast Guard was moved from the Transportation Department; the Secret Service was
moved from Treasury; the Immigration and
Naturalization Service was reformed and
moved from the Department of Justice under
the new name U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; and the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA) was moved
into DHS. The total DHS budget for 2009 will
likely be about $50 billion.
The purpose of the Department of Homeland Security is to coordinate the efforts of
the government’s many agencies as they focus
on preventing future terrorist attacks on the
United States, as well as working with state
and local governments and agencies that also
deal with these issues. This is a difficult task,
since a variety of fairly independent agencies
are involved in this process, including the intelligence community, as we discussed earlier.
Traditional divisions of labor complicate the
issue: for example, the CIA is not permitted
Rights of the Detainees
U.S. Army military police escort a
detainee to his cell in Camp X-Ray
at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba. Human rights groups have
been concerned about reports of
torture and abuse of the detainees,
those captured in Afghanistan and
Iraq in the Bush administration’s
war on terrorism. As they have
been held without charges, the
legal status of these “enemy
combatants” is anything but clear.
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Chapter 19 Foreign Policy
900
Global War on Terrorism
F
ollowing the tragic terrorist attacks of September
11, 2001, the United States embarked on what
President George W. Bush called a global war on terrorism. The American military and intelligence community began to prosecute this war on terrorism in
Afghanistan with Operation Enduring Freedom,
which began October 7, 2001. But the battle in
Afghanistan is only one part of a large and global effort
to strike at terrorist groups around the world—an effort in which the United States is sometimes joined by
other nations. This war on terrorism, as President Bush
outlined it, involves not just military efforts but also
diplomatic, intelligence sharing, and financial components as well. President Bush initiated military action
in Iraq in March 2003, in what he termed the second
major military phase of the war on terrorism.
After the September 11 attacks on the United States
there were two clear targets for retribution: the Taliban
and al Qaeda, both of which were then centered in
Afghanistan. The Taliban was a group of Muslim clerics and students who rose to power out of the chaos
that had enveloped Afghanistan in the late 1980s and
early 1990s. Over time their rule became increasingly
repressive and violent, and they developed close links
with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorist network-allowing al Qaeda to set up training camps in
Afghanistan, while reaping many financial rewards
from the partnership.1 U.S. military action destroyed al
Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan and the Taliban government was run out of power. Now years later, stabiliza-
tion efforts still go on in Afghanistan, as NATO forces
continue to battle a resurgent Taliban, remaining al
Qaeda terrorists (including hunting for Osama bin
Laden), and Afghan warlords who are opposed to
NATO and the central Afghan government, led by
Hamid Karzai. The security situation in Afghanistan
remains difficult; there are over 40,000 NATO troops
in Afghanistan, and in the summer of 2008, the
monthly death toll by allied troops actually exceeded
the toll in Iraq. Many expect that in the coming
months the battle for Afghanistan will require an influx of U.S. and NATO forces.
To wage a global war on terrorism, the United
States has also forged new military partnerships with a
number of countries with which it has not traditionally been close. A key American ally in this war is Pakistan, even though the United States had placed sanctions on Pakistan as recently as 1998, due to its nuclear
weapons tests, and 1999, due to the military coup that
was led by Pervez Musharraf, who ruled Pakistan until
the autumn of 2008. The U.S. government has sent
special forces to act as advisers in the Philippines as
that government fights with a terrorist group linked to
al Qaeda. And the United States has sent a large
amount of military aid to Colombia, as that government fights with a “narco-terrorist” rebel group.
Besides attacking terrorist groups in Afghanistan,
the United States and its allies have tried to find and
block the financial assets of suspected terrorists all
around the world. According to President Bush, more
to spy on domestic targets and does not typically share its information with the FBI,
which is permitted to engage in such activities. The FBI, for its part, has historically
tried to solve crimes after they have happened and to bring criminals to justice. It has
not traditionally been involved in preventing crimes, like terrorist attacks, before they
happen.
The relationship between the agencies of the federal government and state and
local officials is a complicated one. President Bush also created a Homeland Security
Council built on the same principles as its older cousin, the National Security Council (NSC), as a vehicle for bringing together key officials in agencies across the government who focus at least in part on keeping the homeland safe.
The job of providing security at home poses a number of difficult trade-offs, not
only between intelligence gathering and law enforcement but also, as we indicated in
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Foreign Policy Challenges
than 150 nations have blocked over $100 million of
suspected terrorist assets. And an allied effort, led by
the United States, to break up terrorist cells and disrupt
their activities has led to the arrest of more than 1,600
people in ninety-five nations.2 The U.S. government is
offering a reward of up to $25 million for information
that leads to the arrest of major terrorists.
We do not yet know where else the battle against
terrorism may lead. President Bush certainly took the
battle to Iraq as part of the new strategy of preemption,
claiming that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
destruction and had supported al Qaeda and other terrorists. Bush’s goal was to disarm Iraq and to remove
Hussein from power, which could open a long-term
role for the United States in building and supporting an
Iraqi government friendly to the United States, a job we
are still struggling with in Afghanistan. But even though
elections were held in Iraq in January 2005, the job is far
from complete. The security environment there continues to be problematic. U.S. forces alone had suffered
more than 4,000 combat-related deaths by July 2008,
the vast majority of which occurred after combat was
officially declared to be over in May 2003. Over 100,000
American troops are due to stay in Iraq through 2008.
Beyond these difficulties on the ground, the U.S.
also must cope with the damage done to its reputation
since it has become clear that there were no weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq, and the ties to al Qaeda that
were alleged by the Bush administration were specious.
Two prominent foreign policy experts, one a Demo-
901
crat, Joseph Nye, and one a Republican, Richard Armitage, have gone so far as to admit that “people
around the globe are questioning America’s values,
commitment, and competence.” 3 And beyond this reputation issue, the U.S. government again faces the
problem of dealing with intelligence about nuclear
programs, this time in Iran. What if taking military action against Iran, to stop its alleged nuclear weapons
program, actually is the right thing to do, but because
of the failed claims that led to the invasion of Iraq, the
United States is unable or unwilling to use force before
it is too late? Conversely, what if the U.S. president were
to order a military strike against Iran, only to be proven
wrong yet again? The stakes in war are always high, but
they are particularly high right now. The serious challenges we face include how we manage the next stage of
the war and the new strategy of preemption, as well as
how we take on the Taliban and al Qaeda and nation
building in Afghanistan, help build a stable and democratic Iraq, confront Iran, and perhaps North Korea,
and repair relations with our allies when we have declared our willingness to act alone.
1. See, for example, Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret
World of Osama Bin Laden (New York: Free Press, 2001).
2. The White House, “Financial Actions in the War on Terrorism,”
www.whitehouse.gov/response/financialresponse.html.
3. Richard L. Armitage and Joseph S. Nye, Statement before the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, “Implementing Smart Power: Setting an
Agenda for National Security Reform,” April 24, 2008, www.senate.
gov/~foreign/testimony/2008/NyeTestimony080424a.pdf.
earlier chapters, between national security and civil liberties. Resolving these trade-offs
in ways that keep us both safe and free is one of the primary challenges of the future.
CONFLICTS AND ALLIANCES
Now that the Cold War is over, the East-West split no longer defines world politics,
and old alliances are not necessarily relevant to the new world order. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), formed in 1949 and dominated by the United
States, was designed to defend Europe from the Soviets and was a quintessential part
of our containment policy. The Soviets initiated their own military alliance—the Warsaw Treaty Organization (or Warsaw Pact) to counter NATO. Since the end of the Cold
War, the Warsaw Pact is gone, but NATO lives on—so much so, in fact, that in 1999 it
North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO)
multinational organization
formed in 1949 to promote
the Cold War defense of Europe
from the communist bloc
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902
Chapter 19 Foreign Policy
admitted to membership the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, all former Warsaw Pact members. In 2004, more countries from the old “other side” joined NATO:
Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia; and more are on
the way. NATO’s expansion and recent missions in Bosnia and Kosovo show that it is
trying to add to its original defensive mission to include an ability to create order beyond the borders of Western Europe.60 In 2002 the NATO partnership with Russia expanded to give Russia an official voice in NATO policymaking on issues like weapons
proliferation and peacekeeping.61 The 2008 crisis between Georgia and Russia over the
status of Ossetia, as well as the controversy over adding Ukraine to NATO, underscores
that old tensions between the West and Russia have not entirely disappeared. While no
new Cold War is in the offing, the potential for deep disagreements between the
United States and NATO on the one hand, and a stronger, oil-rich Russia on the other,
can still be dangerous.
Today the world is focused on other regional conflicts that were once dwarfed or
silenced by Cold War politics but now clearly have consequences for all nations. These
include conflicts in the Middle East, Kashmir, Darfur, Northern Ireland, Korea, parts
of Africa, the former Yugoslavia, and Chechnya.62 It is difficult to predict where these
conflicts might arise in the future, let alone predict in which ones we might become
involved, but it is a safe bet that events like those in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, and
Kosovo will recur. Although it is not in the power of the United States to solve all of
the world’s problems, many observers would argue that the United States is in a
unique position to be able to bring disputing parties to the table for negotiation and,
it is hoped, to reach a peaceful settlement. Especially in a conflict like that between
India and Pakistan, where both parties have nuclear weapons, the costs of standing by
while countries go to war can be very high.
It is not clear what will trigger future U.S. involvement—whether preventing violence against regional inhabitants will be enough to cause the United States to intervene, or whether the violence must threaten some important U.S. goals or allies in
order to push us to act.63 Our need for allies in dealing with Iraq, for instance, creates
constraints on other choices the administration might wish to make concerning states
like Syria, Pakistan, Turkey, and other Persian Gulf states like Qatar, as well as our European allies. The way we try to cultivate allies in the Middle East to deal with Iraq can
also have implications for the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, since not all of
these potential allies are partners with us in the peace process. It is too soon to know
how the new partnerships formed to wage war on terrorism will affect the calculus
used by U.S. policymakers in determining when and how to intervene with diplomacy
as well as force. As an example of how complicated this can get, perhaps no other partner is more central to the U.S. mission in Afghanistan than Pakistan, yet Pakistan is
locked in a struggle with India over Kashmir, and India—as a democracy in the region—is also an important friend of the United States. And both India and Pakistan
have a nuclear arsenal. Balancing these interests and commitments is the age-old challenge of statecraft.
FREE TRADE VERSUS PROTECTIONISM
As noted earlier, economics stands alongside security issues at the heart of day-to-day
foreign policy. The central economic issues for the United States is the global competitiveness of the U.S. economy, which is strengthened through both domestic and foreign economic policy, and the price of oil, which has huge implications for the strength
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Foreign Policy Challenges
903
of the U.S. economy. How the United States reacts to trade pressures, for example, is
critical. Every country wants to maximize its exports while minimizing its imports. Exports make money; imports cost money. The United States has a number of ways to try
to cajole foreign countries to sell more American goods abroad, and it could also take
steps to try to limit imports at home. However, such protectionist measures can spark
other countries to behave likewise, ultimately hurting trade for everyone.
Another critical issue is how we deal with regional trading blocs. The United States
has to compete with a trade bloc in Europe—the European Union, twenty-seven nations that have agreed to merge their economies and use a single currency—and a series of competitive economies in Asia. So as not to be at a relative disadvantage, the
United States set up the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with
Canada and Mexico. Establishing a North American trade group seemed to make
sense not only for domestic economics but for foreign economic policy as well.64 But
good economics does not always make good politics. NAFTA is very controversial at
home because loosening trade barriers with Canada and Mexico has made it easier for
American jobs to go south, where labor costs are cheaper, and many worry that
NAFTA has accelerated environmental degradation.
This movement toward free trade is not without its detractors. Recent meetings to
promote more free trade, such as the 2001 Summit on a Free Trade Area of the Americas in Quebec City and the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle,
met with fervent and even violent protests. Those who oppose more free trade come
from a variety of perspectives. Some are concerned about the impact of global capitalism on local development around the world, some about the impact on the environment, and some about workers’ rights. And some simply protest the loss of local
control over local affairs that seems to come with globalization. Since these summits
are often held behind closed doors, many people protest the lack of democracy involved in the process of moving toward more free trade. This controversy promises to
be with us for the foreseeable future. Plus, as we discussed earlier, a world with fewer
Cleaning Up the Mess
One criticism of free trade
agreements is their lax oversight
of environmental and working
standards. Here, Cesar Luna, an
attorney for the Environmental
Health Coalition, points to an
estimated 6,600-ton mountain of
debris from the former plant of
Metales y Derivados. The ash-like
residue often blows over a workingclass Tijuana neighborhood below
the plant. The Mexican government
ordered the U.S.-based operators
to shut down the lead recycling
plant in 1994.
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904
Chapter 19 Foreign Policy
trade barriers is a world where goods and services—and jobs—can move across borders more easily and cheaply. Many Americans are against this move toward increasing free trade because of its implications for “outsourcing” jobs and thus making
American workers less secure.
PROBLEMS WITHOUT BORDERS
Additional challenges facing the United States in the post–Cold War era have taken
on larger prominence as the old security issues have changed. These global issues are
those that do not stop conveniently at national borders: the environment, international narcotics trafficking, and transnational organized crime. Environmental
problems are most notable in this respect. Problems such as global climate change
affect everyone, not just Americans.65 While the United States can take some actions
to help the environment worldwide, such as trying to cut so-called greenhouse gases
(emissions that promote global warming), one country acting alone cannot save the
world’s environment. Every country has to pitch in. This means that dealing with
the issue must be a multilateral affair, involving most countries, and on the home
front it must involve a combination of political and economic tools. The United
States has displayed a reluctance to push the environment as a foreign policy issue.
In 2001, for instance, the Bush administration refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol,
a treaty requiring the United States and other nations to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. The administration did not like the targets that were set for states on
how much greenhouse gases they can emit; claimed that restrictions on the United
States were unfair, compared with those on developing states like India and China;
and disagreed with some of the science of global warming on which the treaty was
premised.
International narcotics dealers and organized crime, ranging from the Colombian drug cartels to the Russian mafia, also affect the United States. Perhaps the key
question is whether fighting drugs and organized crime should be foreign or domestic policy, or both. Where should the United States meet the threat? Until recently the drug problem has been regarded as a domestic issue, and the strategy has
been to treat Americans with drug addictions and to fund police and Drug Enforcement Agency efforts to stem the distribution of drugs. During the administration of George H. W. Bush, the United States got more interested in stopping drugs
before they entered the country through interdiction, using intelligence monitoring
and force to stop the flow of drugs, either by arresting the smugglers or by destroying the cargo. President Bush, for example, gave military assistance to Bolivia,
Colombia, and Peru to try to compel those states to fight drugs more vigorously in
their countries. Bush also authorized the invasion of Panama in 1989, in part because of President Manuel Noriega’s links to the drug trade. Noriega was a longtime
ally of the United States who fell out of favor because of the new emphasis on a drug
war; he is now in a Florida prison. The worldwide leader in producing poppies,
which are processed into heroin, is Afghanistan once again. But shutting down the
poppy fields is difficult, and doing so takes away Afghanistan’s major cash crop. How
to balance the drug war against the war on terrorism is another example of how
complicated these issues can get. Today’s policy of “Plan Colombia,” a U.S. aid package that helps fight narcotics in Colombia, which is now intimately linked to the
funding of anti-government terrorism (“narco-terrorism”), also brings these tensions quickly to the forefront.
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Foreign Policy Challenges
905
EXTENDING THE REACH OF DEMOCRACY
Finally, although much of our foreign policy is focused on issues like national and economic security, pollution, and international crime, the United States also takes an active role in promoting its ideology around the globe. Over the past few decades, the
number of democracies in the world has increased dramatically as a percentage of
total countries.66 The number of democracies has, according to ratings kept by the
group Freedom House, increased from fewer than 70 countries in 1986 to over 120
today, or from about 40 percent of the world’s countries to over 60 percent.67 The
United States would like to see even more countries become democratic and thus has
a policy of promoting democracy whenever and wherever possible. But this policy has
created a number of problems for the United States. First, the United States has long
believed that building a strong capitalist economy is a key step toward democracy, but
encouraging capitalism often involves infusing large amounts of money into an economy. The United States doesn’t seem to be as willing to provide that money as it was
in 1947. While President George W. Bush requested about $16 billion per year in foreign aid, this amount only restored levels to just above where they were at the beginning of the Clinton administration.
A second problem associated with increased democratization is that countries
that are moving toward greater democracy require support, such as impartial election monitors, advice on how to set up democratic institutions, and occasionally
troops to fend off those who would push the country in a nondemocratic direction.
The Bush administration, with a strong disinclination to engage in “nation building,” even showed reluctance to offer long-term support to the fledgling Afghan
government. A third problem arises from the fact that the United States promotes
capitalism and open markets abroad as well as democracy, and some countries with
capitalist economies are not particularly democratic. This puts the United States in
the position of having to decide whether to place a priority on capitalism or democracy.68
Another critical political issue facing the United States today concerns human
rights.69 As noted earlier, a number of countries have ongoing civil conflicts, which invariably produce millions of refugees, as well as casualties, starvation, and disease. Aid
for such human rights refugees is expensive, and Americans increasingly view this involvement with little enthusiasm.70 Furthermore, some of the governments of countries with which the United States has close relationships are human rights violators.
As we have indicated, this tension between morality and pragmatism in American foreign policy is not new and is not likely to fade. Our need for allies in the Middle East,
for example, has caused us to turn a blind eye to civil rights violations in countries like
Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In the case of China, too, issues like democracy and human
rights have been edged aside by economic and security issues. The genocide in Darfur
is another example of how complicated these tragedies can be, because the only country with much leverage over the government of Sudan is China, and no one seems to
have much leverage over them right now. On the other hand, the United States and
NATO did use force in Kosovo in 1999, maintaining that Slobodan Milosevic’s campaign of ethnic cleansing was a horrific violation of human rights demanding immediate and drastic action. The debate over whether to be actively engaged around the
world or to pursue a more minimalist or even isolationist approach has been reopened, but no consensus exists on the proper course of American action. Witness the
reactions to the use of force in Kosovo: many pundits and citizens did not see suffiUncorrected page proof. Copyright (c) 2009 by CQ Press, a division of SAGE. CQ Press is a registered trademark of Congressional Quarterly Inc. No part of these pages may be quoted, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic
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906
Profiles in Citizenship
LEE HAMILTON
worked in. You get the
It wasn’t until 1960, when he was asked to organize a recepsense, I think, in the Contion in Columbus, Indiana, for a young senator from Massagress that you’re a bit
chusetts who was running for president, that Lee Hamilton
player in the big drama
got bitten by the politics bug. It was a frozen January day,
and you really are a witand Hamilton could get only thirty-five
ness to history if nothing
people to turn out to meet the candidate.
“. . . it isn’t written in
else. . . . I had very good
Even his wife didn’t go. To make matters
the
stars or in granite
relationships with high ranking officials—
worse, the candidate had laryngitis and
anywhere that the
all of the presidents I worked with, seccouldn’t talk. Still, despite Hamilton’s efUnited
States is always
retaries of state, and others. So I enjoyed
forts, John F. Kennedy went on to win the
going to be preeminent
that, and they would often ask me to
Democratic nomination, and the presiin everything.”
join them for various kinds of discussions
dency of the United States. Kennedy’s asso I participated in that.”
sistant, Ted Sorenson, later told Hamilton
Hamilton’s area of expertise was foreign policy. Members
laughingly that it was the worst event they had during the
of Congress try to get committee assignments that will help
entire campaign. It was enough to hook Hamilton, though.
them serve the folks back home. Hamilton tried to get on
Growing up in Evansville, Indiana, Lee Hamilton didn’t
Public Works and Agriculture, with no luck, but landed on
have much interest in anything but basketball. In Hamilton’s
Foreign Affairs (now called the Committee on International
day, he didn’t have too many options for playing past high
Relations) instead—an assignment he accepted figuring he’d
school, so he went to college and then to law school withwait his turn for a more appropriate spot to open up. But, as
out any clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life. He
he tells the tale, “I got on it and I liked it. So I stayed. And
was bored practicing law, so when Kennedy and his ensome years later, Carl Albert, the Speaker, came to me and
tourage came through he was ripe to be tempted by another
said he wanted me to go on the Ways and Means Commitcareer. Two years later, his fraternity brother Birch Bayh ran
tee, which is usually considered a plum assignment. And I
for the Senate and asked Hamilton to head up the campaign
told him I’d think about it. And the next day I came into his
in his county. That was all it took—two years after that he
office and told him no, which surprised him. And a month or
had gotten himself elected to the U.S. House of Representaso later I was on the House floor and he came up to me and
tives, where he stayed for the next thirty-four years.
said in a good natured way, ‘Lee, I keep thinking about the
He had clearly found his niche. He says, “Well, I enjoyed
time you turned me down on Ways and Means. You must be
the Congress and I had a sense of being at the center of
the dumbest man in the United States.’ ”
things. I felt that I was having an impact in the areas that I
cient national interest to warrant the spending of American money and the risking of
American lives.
The dawn of the twenty-first century finds the United States facing an
array of unprecedented foreign policy issues. International terrorism,
WHAT
globalization, global climate change, international crime, humanitarian
and environmental catastrophes, and expanding democracy pose chalHOW
lenges for U.S. foreign policy makers that cannot be solved with the old
Cold War paradigm. U.S. policymakers must resolve inherent tensions between valued
but conflicting resources in order to deal with problems and issues that transcend national borders, and they must craft solutions that reflect the new world order.
WHO
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Profiles in Citizenship
Hardly. Over the years, Hamilton made his name in foreign policy. He went on to chair the committee and developed an expertise that has kept him busy in “retirement,” in
such positions as the vice chair of the National Commission
on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the bipartisan
September 11 Commission), and as the president and director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Like so many others who have left Congress with considerable expertise and access to top-level decision makers,
Hamilton could be cleaning up as a lobbyist. Instead, relaxed and content in his airy office at the Woodrow Wilson
Center, this big, grandfatherly man is content to share his
years of knowledge and insights with students, scholars,
and the public. We are lucky to be among them. Here are
some of his thoughts:
On patriotism:
I think patriotism manifests itself in a lot of different ways.
And you usually think of patriotism as saluting the flag or
serving in the armed forces or doing something dramatic—
winning medals for something in combat. But you have a
quiet kind of patriotism as well. People who love their
country, maybe they’re not as rhetorical about it but live
very good, solid, constructive lives. And I think they’re patriotic as well. They exemplify the virtues of democratic society. You know one of the words used by the founding fathers quite a bit is the word “virtue.” And we don’t use that
word as much. If I got up on a political stump today and
talked about virtue they’d throw me out in the hall. They
meant, of course, different things by it, but they were not
907
afraid to talk about values. In a sense for a representative
government to work, the people have to be, in their words,
virtuous. And by that they really meant what I guess we
would mean by participation and involvement.
On keeping the republic:
Well you know, Lincoln asked, “Whether this nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure,” and that was the
operative question at Gettysburg. But I think it still is a
good question today. And I think we try to impress on students that it isn’t written in the stars or in granite anywhere
that the United States is always going to be preeminent in
everything. It depends on us and the choices that we make
now. I think I would say to young people that their nation,
their country, really makes a wager on them. And it says to
them, in effect, we’ll give you freedom, we’ll give you opportunity, and in return for that we want you to live your
life constructively. And beneficially. I’ve always been attracted to the idea of the common good. You don’t hear as
much about it now. Maybe it’s a little out of date. But I
think there is more to life than just earning money and having a good time. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with
either one of those things, we all do that, but that’s not the
sum and substance of life. And so I believe and try to convey that we have an obligation that runs beyond ourselves.
I think a lot of young people need to understand how fortunate they are. I would say to them that they’re the most
fortunate young people in the world—without any doubt.
You travel all over the world and every teenager wants to
come to the United States.
THE CITIZENS AND FOREIGN POLICY
As we have seen throughout this chapter, the terrain of foreign policy is complex, dangerous, and confusing in the post–Cold War and post–September 11 era. But a related
complexity is that, in the United States, policy—including foreign policy—is supposed
to be made in a democratic fashion. The story of foreign policy making that we have
examined here shows it to be largely an elite activity, even though elites may take public opinion into account. Much of foreign policy, at least since World War II, has been
dominated by the president and the executive agencies with foreign policy authority—
perhaps the least democratic and least accountable actors in American politics. The
shroud of secrecy surrounding foreign policy, especially during the Cold War, has
made it hard for citizens to know not only what policymakers know but even what
they do in our name. It is thus difficult for citizens to evaluate their elected represenUncorrected page proof. Copyright (c) 2009 by CQ Press, a division of SAGE. CQ Press is a registered trademark of Congressional Quarterly Inc. No part of these pages may be quoted, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
908
Chapter 19 Foreign Policy
tatives and the important unelected actors in the bureaucracy, and to hold them accountable for their actions. This secrecy seemed necessary during the Cold War
because of the obvious dangers of the nuclear age, but we should recognize that
clear trade-offs were made between steps taken in the name of security (secrecy)
and processes required by democracy (openness and accountability). Some of this
secrecy has been lifted in the wake of the Cold War, but there is still much to learn
and new foreign policy to be crafted. Policymaking in the wake of September 11
was tightly controlled, too, with few members of Congress even privy to the plans
of the Bush administration.
The tension between foreign policy and democracy is perhaps unavoidable.
Crisis policy is by its very nature made quickly, often out of sight, by the president
and a small group of advisers. Presidents take the likely reaction of the public into
account when they make crisis policy, but citizens have little input and often little
information about what happened.71 Strategic policy is normally made in the bureaucracy of the executive branch. While interest groups and Congress may have
some voice in the process and anticipated public reaction is probably taken into
account, this kind of policy too is made with little citizen input. And even structural defense policy, which is largely crafted in Congress with heavy input from interest groups, defense contractors, and the military, is made without a large degree
of public scrutiny. So the dual challenge of keeping the republic comes into sharp
focus: foreign policy must keep the republic safe, but it must also meet some
meaningful democratic standard. Sometimes it is hard to know which is the
greater challenge.
Unfortunately, meeting a democratic standard in foreign policy making is even
harder than we think. As we saw earlier in this chapter, a large part of the American public does not pay much attention to foreign policy issues and knows little
about them. This makes it even more difficult to hold policymakers like the president accountable in the arena of foreign policy. Just as it would be hard for you
to hold someone accountable for the job he or she is doing when you know little
about how that job works, so too is it hard to hold policymakers accountable for
their foreign policy acts if you have little or no information about them. The old
question—Who guards the guardians?—is nowhere so complex as in the foreign
policy and national security realm.
The end of the Cold War presented an opportunity to open up the foreign policy process, to cut through the shroud of secrecy that has cloaked America’s foreign and security policy. The “excuse” that information could leak that might trigger World War III or lead to the global triumph of the Soviet Union was no longer
plausible. The CIA and the rest of the intelligence community especially come
under fire in this new era for their perceived failures. For example, despite the attention they lavished on the Soviet Union, Americans watched it crumble live on
CNN with no warning from the CIA.72 A book by former senator Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, D-N.Y., makes an intriguing observation about the pernicious effects
of secrecy, one worth considering here.73 Moynihan argues that we should see secrecy as a form of government regulation—part of the list of rules and procedures
for how the government works. We are in a position now when people from both
political parties argue that government is too big, that it has too many rules and
regulations; it must be redesigned to have less red tape; it must be more effective
and more efficient. Moynihan proposes that as we scale back other rules, we also
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or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
What’s At Stake Revisited
909
rethink these secrecy regulations. Designed to protect the United States, over time
they have tended to endanger the republic more than protect it because they shut
down the process of discussion and evaluation that is so important to developing
wise policy. Moynihan argues that regulations be eliminated not just so that foreign policy can be more open and accountable to the public but also so that it can
be made better in the future. Yet while so many people across both parties want
smaller government, we have actually increased the size of government in recent
years and returned to the wholesale classification of information. Legislation like
the Patriot Act passed after the attacks of September 11 are meant to help law enforcement work better to track terrorists, but many of its provisions can make it
easier for the government to track any of us. Balancing security and liberty, safety
and freedom, is the never-ending challenge of keeping the republic.
WHAT’S AT STAKE REVISITED
W
e began this chapter by asking what is at stake when U.S. leaders decide
whether or not to talk to the country’s enemies. Many people argue that
national leaders have to deal with the world as it is, and that includes talking to our
enemies. It might be nice to ignore them, but to think that we could do so is folly,
as a practical matter, and potentially dangerous.74 Others argue that negotiating
with our enemies is actually the more dangerous course of action, giving them a
strategic asset that they would not otherwise have, and thus an advantage over us.75
The stakes involved in this question, are perhaps the highest imaginable. What
if talking might prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons? But, on the other
hand, what if we start negotiating with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela or
Raul Castro in Cuba and these negotiations serve to strengthen their
Thinking Outside the Box
antidemocratic control over their countries, by making them look as
though they are equals to the United States of America? Getting the an• Does being the world’s sole
swer right isn’t just about some trade deal, it could make the difference
remaining superpower carry any
between war and peace, life and death.
special obligations?
As we discussed in this chapter, the Bush administration was
• Are there enough checks and
very opposed to negotiating with enemies like North Korea, thinking
balances in the foreign policy
that it only emboldened North Korea’s leaders, who they believed
process? Are there too many?
would cheat on any agreement anyway. As the Bush administration’s
• How much should foreign policy
second term continued, however, Assistant Secretary of State Christoreflect the will of the people?
pher R. Hill successfully persuaded his superiors that bilateral talks
with North Korea could lead to progress in halting North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.76 Though strongly criticized by many Republicans, especially members of Bush’s foreign policy team from the first
term, who believed that talking directly to North Korea amounted to appeasing the
enemy, these talks eventually led to a new agreement that may in fact halt North
Korea’s nuclear program. Only time will tell for sure, but this certainly makes it
look like a real opportunity to make the world a safer place would have been
missed had we continued to refuse to speak to North Korea. Can we draw a lesson
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or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
910
Chapter 19 Foreign Policy
from that one case? Just because it was the right thing to do with North Korea,
does that mean it is the right thing to do with Iran? With Cuba? With Syria? With
Venezuela? With Burma?
@UPDATE:As an example of just how important elections are to our democracy, the 2008 U.S. presidential election posed voters with a stark choice: John McCain was against talking to enemies; Barack Obama was inclined to have discussions with our enemies. This is a complex and weighty question, to talk or not to
talk, and now that the votes have been counted, the new president and his advisers will have the difficult task of weighing how to deal with America’s enemies in
order to help keep the republic. space for an extra 75-100 words Lorem ipsum
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To Sum Up
KEY TERMS
http://republic.cqpress.com
antiterrorism (p. )
Bush Doctrine (p. )
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) (p. )
coercive diplomacy (p. )
Cold War (p. )
compellence (p. )
containment (p. )
counterterrorism (p. )
covert operations (p. )
crisis policy (p. )
Department of Defense (p. )
Department of Homeland Security (p. )
Department of State (p. )
deterrence (p. )
diplomacy (p. )
director of national intelligence (p. )
economic sanctions (p. )
embargo (p. )
foreign aid (p. )
foreign policy (p. )
free trade (p. )
General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT) (p. )
hegemon (p. )
intelligence community (p. )
intergovernmental organizations (p. )
International Monetary Fund (IMF) (p. )
internationalism (p. )
interventionism (p. )
isolationism (p. )
Joint Chiefs of Staff (p. )
Marshall Plan (p. )
most favored nation (p. )
multinational corporations (p. )
National Security Council (p. )
nongovernmental organizations (p. )
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) (p. )
nuclear triad (p. )
peace dividend (p. )
preemption (p. )
preventive war (p. )
propaganda (p. )
protectionism (p. )
rogue states (p. )
strategic policy (p. )
structural defense policy (p. )
superterrorism (p. )
terrorism (p. )
Truman Doctrine (p. )
weapons of mass destruction (p. )
World Bank (p. )
911
Key terms, chapter summaries, practice quizzes, Internet links, and other study aids
are available on the companion web site at http://republic.cqpress.com.
SUMMARY
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• Foreign policy refers to a government’s goals and actions toward actors outside the
borders of its territory. These foreign actors may include other countries, multinational corporations, intergovernmental organizations, nongovernmental organizations, or groups that fall outside these categories.
• Strained relations rather than actual battles marked the Cold War, waged from 1947
to 1989 between the United States and the Soviet Union. The American foreign policy of containment sought to halt the development of communism in all parts of the
world. Having achieved that goal, American leaders still struggle to develop a foreign
policy for the post–Cold War era and to combat global terrorism.
• There are three types of American foreign policy, each dominated by different actors.
Crisis policy requires immediate decision making and is controlled by the president
and his national security advisers. Strategic policy (long range) tends to be formulated
within the executive branch. Structural defense policy, which deals primarily with defense spending and military bases, is most often crafted by the Defense Department
and Congress, which has the ultimate authority when it comes to spending.
• The American public and its leaders since World War II have embraced internationalism, the active role of a country in global affairs. Internationalists endorse free trade
and favor involvement in the United Nations and World Trade Organization. Other
actors, whose focus is mostly domestic, advocate both economic protectionism and
isolationism from foreign affairs.
• The United States has three basic foreign policy goals: security of the homeland, economic growth, and support of democracy in the world. However, when these goals
conflict, support for democracy has often lost out. The anarchical international system and increasing global economic interdependence ensure that security and economic problems will be top priorities.
• American foreign policy makers use many strategies and tools to create effective
policy, including deterrence and compellence strategies and economic tools such as
foreign aid and sanctions, political tools such as diplomacy, coercive diplomacy, and
covert operations, and, when these options fail, military action.
• Ongoing foreign policy challenges include dealing with the war on terrorism, ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, forming alliances in a post<en>Cold War
world, protecting American interests in a global economy, managing problems without borders (like smuggling and pollution), and balancing pragmatic security concerns
with the desire to extend democracy throughout the world.
• Tension may be unavoidable between foreign policy and democracy. Secrecy may be
essential for successful foreign policy; crisis policy in particular requires both surprise
and quick decision making. Democracy, on the other hand, demands openness and
accountability on the part of public officials.
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or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
To Sum Up (continued)
PRACTICE QUIZ
SUGGESTED RESOURCES
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1. The three major types of foreign policy are
Books
a. crisis policy, war policy, and peace policy.
b. war policy, peace policy, and Cold War policy.
c. strategic policy, nonstrategic policy, and tactical policy.
d. crisis policy, strategic policy, and structural defense
policy.
e. defense policy, spending policy, and terrorism policy.
2. The executive department charged with managing
diplomacy and foreign affairs is the
a. State Department.
b. National Security Council.
c. Defense Department.
d. Foreign Relations Council.
e. Homeland Security Council.
3. Restricting the sale of arms to countries that violate
human rights would be an example of
a. a policy driven by economic goals.
b. a policy based on moral concerns.
c. policy decisions designed to reduce international
conflict.
d. a return to isolationism.
e. disarmament.
4. The doctrine of protectionism is defined as
a. the imposition of trade barriers such as tariffs to make
trading conditions favorable to domestic producers.
b. the formation of organizations such as NATO to
ensure protection from military threats.
c. civil defense policies that protect populations
from attack.
d. the policy of trying to guarantee human rights to
minorities around the world.
e. the use of military force to achieve foreign policy goals.
5. An example of a transnational challenge to
the United States is
a. the Arab League.
b. the European Union.
c. al Qaeda.
Allison, Graham, and Philip Zelikow. 1999. Essence of
Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2d ed.
New York: Longman. The classic study of decision making
by President Kennedy and his advisers during the Cuban
missile crisis; this revised edition reflects much of the
new scholarship on the crisis that has emerged since
the Cold War ended.
Bergen, Peter L. 2002. Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret
World of Osama Bin Laden. New York: Free Press.
An in-depth look at Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network
and how he managed to attack the United States and
U.S. interests so efficiently.
Chandrasekaran, Rajiv. 2006. Imperial Life in the Emerald
City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone. New York: Knopf. Awardwinning book by a Washington Post reporter about the
steps, and missteps, at the start of the U.S. occupation
of Iraq.
Clarke, Richard. 2004. Against All Enemies: Inside America’s
War on Terror. New York: Free Press. A veteran counterterrorism expert from the Clinton and Bush years, Clarke’s
memoir is gripping and, at times, depressing.
Crawford, John. 2005. The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell:
An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq.
New York: Penguin. An eyewitness account of one soldier’s
war in Iraq, and the journey home again.
Fried, Amy. 1997. Muffled Echoes: Oliver North and
the Politics of Public Opinion. New York: Columbia
University Press. An interesting study of the relationships
between policymakers, the public, and the media, seen
through the lens of Oliver North and the Iran-contra
scandal.
Gelb, Leslie H., and Richard K. Betts. 1979. The Irony of
Vietnam: The System Worked. Washington, D.C.:
Brookings Institution. A classic study of the roots of U.S.
policy in Vietnam. Gelb and Betts reject the popular idea
that Vietnam was a “quagmire” in which we got caught;
rather, they argue, U.S. involvement was the predictable
result of a calculated policy to “not lose this year.”
Hinckley, Barbara. 1994. Less Than Meets the Eye: Foreign
Policy Making and the Myth of the Assertive Congress.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. A strongly argued
view of the overrated role that Congress plays in making
American foreign policy.
d. Serbian nationalism.
e. the Cold War.
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or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
To Sum Up
913
Janis, Irving L. 1989. Crucial Decisions: Leadership in
Policymaking and Crisis Management. New York:
Free Press. An incisive study of how presidents lead and
manage advisers in foreign policy--sometimes well and
sometimes poorly.
Woodward, Bob. 2006. State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III.
New York: Simon and Schuster. An interesting, if largely
unattributed, account of the behind-the-scenes policy
struggles that surrounded decisions about the war in Iraq.
Johnson, Loch K. 1989. America’s Secret Power: The CIA in
a Democratic Society. New York: Oxford University
Press. A classic presentation of the roles and tensions of
the secret organization at the heart of our open society’s
intelligence community.
Web Sites
Kolko, Gabriel. 1969. The Roots of American Foreign Policy:
An Analysis of Power and Purpose. Boston: Beacon Press.
A different view: a Marxist analysis of the roots of American
foreign policy, emphasizing the economic interests at the
heart of U.S. policy.
McDougall, Walter. 1985. . . .the Heavens and the Earth:
A Political History of the Space Age. New York: Basic
Books. An outstanding overview of the race for space
by the United States; it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986.
O’Rourke, P. J. 1992. Give War a Chance: Eyewitness
Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle Against Tyranny,
Injustice and Alcohol-Free Beer. New York: Atlantic
Monthly Press. A collection of very funny and provocative
essays by satirist O’Rourke, most drawn from his reporting
on foreign policy (and other) events.
Schulzinger, Robert D. 2007. U.S. Diplomacy Since 1900,
6th ed. New York: Oxford University Press. An excellent
history of U.S. foreign relations, with especially insightful
chapters about the path of American foreign policy
before our rise to global preeminence.
Sheehan, Neil. 1988. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann
and America in Vietnam. New York: Random House.
A fascinating look into America’s war in Vietnam through
the eyes of controversial war hero Vann, by one of the
journalists who covered the war.
Strobel, Warren P. 1997. Late-Breaking Foreign Policy:
The News Media’s Influence on Peace Operations.
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace Press. A good
discussion of the effects of the modern media on U.S.
foreign policy making, highlighting recent case studies
such as Somalia, Haiti, and others.
Foreign Policy Association. www.fpa.org. The Foreign
Policy Association (FPA) is a national, nonprofit, nonpartisan
educational organization founded in 1918 to inform Americans about significant world issues that have an important
impact on their lives. The FPA web site provides historical
background on important foreign policy decisions, monthly
news analysis of major foreign policy issues, and an
opportunity for readers to voice their opinions.
Council on Foreign Relations. www.cfr.org. The Council
on Foreign Relations is a nonpartisan organization that
promotes understanding of foreign policy and America’s
role in the world. It also publishes the journal Foreign
Affairs, which for decades has been perhaps the most
significant publication of its kind.
Movies
Charlie Wilson’s War. 2007. Starring Tom Hanks, this movie is
based on the real-life efforts of former Texas congressman
Charlie Wilson’s efforts to increase support for the Afghan
rebels fighting the Soviets in the Carter and Reagan years.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and
Love the Bomb. 1964. A comedy-thriller satirizing Cold
War madness and featuring manic performances from
George C. Scott and Peter Sellers (who plays three separate
roles, including the title part). It’s so good, I’m watching it
as I write this.
The Fog of War. 2003. A probing documentary focusing on
former secretary of defense Robert McNamara and U.S.
involvement in Vietnam.
Seven Days in May. 1964. Outstanding “conspiracy theory”
movie based on the novel by the same name about
a military coup attempt against the U.S. government.
It delves into Cold War politics and civilian-military
relationships.
Suskind, Ron. 2006. The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside
America’s Pursuit of its Enemies Since 9/11. New York:
Simon and Schuster. A penetrating journey through the
Bush administration’s policies for the war on terrorism.
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or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.